So I Thought
by Aran'sApprentice-Meahow
Summary: Samus thought she was held in high regards at the federation. She thought she would never see two beings again: one a deadly enemy, the other a trusted friend. So she thought...
1. Dire Forebodings

( Disclaimer: Nintendo owns Metroid and all its components, characters, etc. I, however, own this whole dang plot. Thank you very much...  
  
This is a story with a lot of emotional conflict; however, seeing the fact that Metroid was designed as a video game, i will try to add action and a little humor as well. Enjoy...and REVIEW! )  
  
~ ~ ~  
  
I : Dire Forebodings  
  
The twin suns of planet Aressus washed the evening sky in vivid color, providing a rainbow backdrop to the glittering lights of the city on the horizon. A little further away, on the outskirts of one of the numerous pay-per-day shipyards, a woman sat on top of a sleek silver spacecraft, watching the sunset.  
  
(A/N...this is a sappy beginning. please don't mind it. continuing...)  
  
Her blond ponytail and pale skin were stained golden, violet and red from the soft light. She had stretched her long legs out on the hull before her and was leaning against the opening hatch, eyes closed to slits.  
  
A chill breeze swept through the atmosphere, and she shivered and opened her eyes. The sunset was beautiful, but Samus's metroid DNA allowed her to take no pleasure wherever cold was concerned. Sighing, she stretched her lean frame and entered the ship through the hatch.  
  
Feeling sluggish and relaxed, Samus walked to the kitchen-unit for a soda, popped the seal, and sat down in the control room in front of her computer. Since she had nothing to do, she could've gone to bed, but she didn't feel tired. It wasn't easy to find a lull in the ceaseless conflict between the Federation and the Space Pirates, and Samus was determined to milk her vacation to the last.  
  
She had just run out of luck.  
  
The computer consule, sensing her presence, stirred. "Good evening, Lady," it said calmly, in a voice she knew well. A pang of regret shot through Samus's mind; she quickly pushed it away. There were some things she didn't allow herself to think about. It was bad enough that she had given in on the computer issue.  
  
It had been a simple hack to copy the automated ADAM unit from HQ's borrowed ship to her new spacecraft. And a silly act of self indulgence, Samus told herself. Still...  
  
Her train of thought was allowed to go no further as ADAM's voice cut through her silence. "Lady, a transmission from HQ has just arrived. Should I access it?"  
  
"Sure," Samus said, not really listening. The face of a man dressed in a customary federation grey labcoat—they all looked the same to Samus—appeared on the screen. A voice message, then. Not written. Samus straightened up. What could be this important? Another mission?  
  
The familiar adrenaline rush that accompanied these calls was beginning to show its effect. 'This message requires a password. Would you like me to enter all possible matches?" ADAM inquired. Samus nodded eagerly. "Go ahead." After a couple of seconds of calculation, the image bleeped into life. Samus sat forward, listening intently.  
  
"Ms. Aran," it began, "It has come to our attention that certain information pertaining to federation matters had been picked up by the general public. Some of this information may be unknown to you. However, we request that whatever you hear, see, or otherwise deduct, you remain in your current position. For security purposes all messages you may attempt to contact us with will be cut. You will be informed at a later time when and if it is deemed necessary. I repeat, do not leave your current location. This is critical. Sincerely, HQ official..." It rambled off on a string of meaningless names and titles.  
  
Samus's voice was hoarse. "ADAM, repeat that." The cold, precise tones played over again. She half-expected them to say something different, that she had been dreaming. Or having a nightmare, more like.  
  
This was not right. Samus got up and paced the control room. The peace of five minutes ago had evaporated. It seemed the lull had been broken, but by what? HQ wasn't telling her; that was certain. And ordinarily Samus wouldn't have waited to find out.  
  
But she had been ordered—no questions about that—to stay here. This was bad. It was more than bad. It was WRONG.  
  
~ ~ ~ (A/N: Well, now that you've read it, review. NOW!!! It can't be that hard!! Errr...sorry, the author is experiencing a moment of insanity. i have those quite often.  
  
In any case, you will NEVER IN ALL ETERNITY get to finish the rest of the story if i don't get at least 1 review. C'mon, just one. O-N-E. but, of course, i'm hoping for A LOT more... *winks*  
  
Oh, Btw, i love cliffies, so be warned.  
  
Bye people! ) 


	2. The Line Crossed

( A/N: well, i'm back. once again, thanks for all the reviews! I'll try to remember what you people said; some of it is pretty good advice. In answer to the questions—my idea was that Samus was taking a break on that planet, probably only a little bit after Fusion. I guess i didn't make that clear enough. Anyway, Night Genie, I just put the '( )' things around a/n's because I want to. Sooo...on with the fic! Oh yeah, if anyone is a TV reporter, please don't be offended by some of this stuff...)  
  
II : The Line Crossed  
  
Samus glanced at the wall clock. 4:38. She grunted and threw the covers off her bunk, rolling out unceremoniously and landing lightly on the floor. She felt coiled, tense, like a spring; there was no way she could force herself to get any more rest.  
  
She wandered to the bathroom-unit, washed her face and dragged a comb through her hair, tying it into a ponytail without a second thought. It had become automatic; no style choices for a bounty hunter.  
  
Grumbling over an energy bar at breakfast, Samus sat in front of her computer console and stared at the screen. ADAM greeted her with as near a concerned frown as a voice module could get. "Perhaps you should go outside and get some of the tension out of your muscles," it suggested.  
  
Samus shrugged, headed out the hatch and ran in swift circles around her ship as the suns slowly rose above the horizon. She felt like a bird, flying the perimeter of its cage. Trapped. Pointless.  
  
She came inside after an hour, not even sweating, her lips pressed into a painful grimace. Turning to her computer, she told it, "Get me to HQ's website. I'm going to try and hack into their database." ADAM's silence testified to the personality's dislike of breaking galactic law; but Samus knew it wouldn't stop her since she controlled the system, it couldn't disobey her, although it could try to dissuade her from a course of action.  
  
She wracked her brain over the next few hours, determined not to give up without a fight. The morning news had appeared in a corner of her screen and wasn't going away. The heads of the reporters, blabbing on about stocks, pirate raids, and murderers annoyed Samus to no end, but she worked doggedly on, her eyes glued to the screen. ADAM gave up trying to stop her and began looking for program glitches, which helped.  
  
Scowling, Samus entered another sequence and, while it was loading, transferred her attention to the news long enough to find out how to turn it off. Here was one problem she could solve... after a moment of scrutiny, she located the off setting and told the computer to activate it.  
  
The news had just turned to an old HQ clip, and the voice of the reporter was saying, "...the late federation CO, Ad—" The screen shut off. Samus's head snapped back to the place where it had been.  
  
"ADAM," she said, "turn that back on!"  
  
The image reappeared, the reporter's face once more in the spotlight. "—ich, presumed dead, may still be alive. Here's Laura for the details."  
  
Samus stared at the tiny panel, computer forgotten. Her mind was reeling.  
  
"A transmission from one space pirate ship to another was intercepted by one of HQ's satellites last night," Laura explained, wearing a serious expression that could only be described as bad acting. "This contained images of a man very like the last photoscan of Adam Malkovich. Here on the left is a photoscan of Malkovich taken during his supposed last year, at age 25. On the right is the clearest of the images from the space pirate ship. Studies have shown that the man on the right is 29, the same age that Malkovich would be now."  
  
Samus's hand on the edge of the control panel was turning white at the knuckles from her grip. She only noticed when she had to unclamp it to turn up the volume and found it slimy with sweat.  
  
It was the original reporter speaking now. "What will HQ do about this situation? Find out next on KBC 6!" The picture reverted to commercials. Samus sprinted to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of water, and drained it in one gulp.  
  
Adam Malkovich. Alive. Samus's one, most trusted friend. But the initial elation was being replaced by something far less welcome.  
  
If Adam were still alive, why hadn't he tried to contact anyone? Did it have to do with the space pirate ship? Was this what HQ was trying to keep her from? If so, why?  
  
Samus didn't dare take her eyes off the screen.  
  
"Next," the reporter said after finally finishing the commercials, "Laura is at federation HQ to interview a top official in the case. Laura?" The view switched to the government buildings, where a brown-haired woman in shorts and spaghetti-strap shirt was standing next to an official wearing HQ grey.  
  
"This is Matthew Arastrough from galactic headquarters," Laura announced. "Sir, what does your department plan to do about this situation?"  
  
Arastrough's voice sounded a touch familiar to Samus as he answered. "Adam Malkovich was a valuable asset to the federation. If something has simply happened to him, we will, of course, try at all means to bring him back to HQ."  
  
Samus, hunched over the control panel like a hungry vulture, growled, "Tell us something we don't already know."  
  
The man continued, his voice a clipped monotone. The voice message. That was where she had seen him before. "However, we have reason to doubt that Malkovich is still working for the federation.  
  
Samus sat, frozen in place. A muscle was twitching in her forearm.  
  
"The fact that the message was sent from space pirate ship is in itself evidence. This leads one's mind to the logical conclusion that our CO was captured by pirates and kept in isolation. However, deeper investigation has had slightly different results. This is Josina Baker, head of our foresenics crew."  
  
A woman wearing (as always) a grey labcoat was now in view. Her glossy black hair looked like it hadn't seen a puff of wind in weeks.  
  
"We had noticed," Josina said to Laura, "that the photoscan did not seem to be of a man held captive for years. He looks relatively healthy and alert, which is not usually to be said about the conditions of a space pirate prisoner. In fact, the fact that Malkovich is still alive is a strong pointer in the other direction. As no ransom or threats were ever received, there is no clear evidence as to the purpose of Malkovich's 'capture.'"  
  
Arastrough was talking again. "Thus speaking, we must assume that Malkovich, for an unknown reason, is a willing participant in this...situation."  
  
There was a buzzing in Samus's head. Her face, pale from the shelter of her power suit, was drained of any color it had once held. Each piece of evidence was like a slap in the face, leaving the recipient stunned. For now.  
  
"Of course, this conclusion is always open to new evidence. This is soon to be procured. The means by which HQ does so will remain classified for the time being."  
  
The buzzing in Samus's head was being replaced by a soundless, mindless roar. Her jaw was set so hard her teeth ached.  
  
The first reporter's head reappeared on the screen and opened its mouth to speak, but before it could utter a word Samus's hand had shot out and pressed the off switch. In the sudden silence, she slammed her hand down on the control panel, making the screen rattle violently.  
  
"Lies," Samus whispered, in a voice that dripped venom, "And the idiots who believe them."  
  
A message appeared on the now-blank computer screen, as if in answer to her statement. Access to primary database granted. Samus punched the continue icon and scrolled down the panels of documents and labels.  
  
There it was. A document from Matthew Arastrough to another official. Samus's hand was twitching as she clicked the icon.  
  
...public opinion is now that acclaimed bounty hunter Samus Aran is no longer on the federation's side...evidence suggests Adam Malkovich's death was simply a cover-up for his joining the space pirates...with her destruction of, among numerous others, BSL and SR388, we can count Aran as another potential foe, perhaps even the one who lured Malkovich, once a dedicated official, to join the enemy side...we did suspect an 'unusual ' relationship between Aran and her CO, but hadn't expected it would go so far...  
  
Samus bit her lip to keep from screaming. Lies. Trash. Scum.  
  
...to investigate further possibilities, we are sending a single spy into the space pirate base where Malkovich allegedly is. Several candidates had been selected, but one stands out. This being was once a space pirate ally, but was rescued from the brink of death at the hands of—who else?—Samus Aran.  
  
Originally, the rescue was attempted for research only; however, we were quickly impressed with his intelligence, discovering not a creature but a sentient being. He says that his experience has changed his ways, and he is a stoic supporter of the federation. I believe now that this Yeldir is the answer to our problems, including that of Aran...  
  
No.  
  
It couldn't be.  
  
Yeldir. y-e-l-d-i-R.  
  
Something snapped.  
  
A red haze was building in Samus's vision. All her barely held control melted away to leave a seething mass of emotions, the principal of which erupted with a force that shook the walls.  
  
"Those idiots!" Samus roared. "They've got it all wrong! I thought we had a government! I thought there was SOMEONE out there who wasn't a filthy, lying moron! This is what I get for thinking?!" The sound reverberated against the walls of the command room, making Samus's skull pound with the noise. "How can those—those—people believe HE is on our side when they can't even believe I am? Is it so hard to see? Are they all blind? Adam...Adam wouldn't do something like that! I don't care what they say—it's all lies! All of it!"  
  
The bounty hunter's whole powerful frame was consumed by rage, every muscle, nerve and fiber flung into her madness. Every ounce of her conscious mind was seething, boiling, scalding.  
  
Almost.  
  
Deep down inside her, in the lowest layer of her subconscious, there was a place untouched by her anger. It was coldly emotionless, as bleak as a place of dull grey nothingness. And in that place resided a little voice, scarcely more than a whisper, a voice that put into words everything she would never admit, everything she tried to hide from herself.  
  
They could be right, it said flatly, the unbiased voice of reason. Unemotional, and yet so cruel... You don't know other people's minds. You aren't the perfect judge of character. He was your first CO—you were young. Less experienced. Sheltered. And people change...  
  
"Lies," Samus cried, "all of them!"  
  
Somehow, that little voice seemed to hold more power than all her screams of rage.  
  
(Well, once again, tell me what you think. I hope it has fewer problems than last time; personally i like this chapter and its descriptions. By the way, Night Genie, youre in luck—the romance shouldn't start until close to chapter 12. Yes, i do have it all planned out... And just to tell you, I may not have time to update for a while, as i've got a research paper to work on for school...  
  
As to the question, i'm sorry but you will have to be disappointed. I hope that, if you read this whole story, you will see my reasoning—about who, i will leave a mystery...heh heh, i'm evil aren't i? In any case, i can say that it is NOT some sappy OC...happy guessing!  
  
well, i think that's about all. and I will borrow J.Rolande's phrase, because it seems appropriate—See you next mission! ) 


	3. Computer Logic

(A/N yes, another chapter! it's a short one, but i'm trying to make it good.)  
  
III: Computer Logic  
  
Samus ranted and raved until her voice was cracked and hoarse, until she had nothing left in her. Then she collapsed in front of the computer, listless and drained, put her head down on her arms and sighed. She felt like a fire burnt out, a light suddenly turned off.  
  
It wasn't right. She had to just sit here, waiting, useless and helpless, as HQ delved into matters they didn't know how to handle. Stupid federation officials and their damned lies.  
  
No, that wasn't true. Now that her anger had cooled, Samus realized that the officials at HQ weren't lying. Their ideas might be wrong, but they didn't know any better. They were doing what they knew how to do. It was their job.  
  
Like mine is to be out there, helping, Samus thought. Any empathy she might have felt for the officials was swallowed up by the rush of bitterness that welled up inside her at the unfairness. And she was back to the old standby—it wasn't right.  
  
It was then that ADAM spoke.  
  
"Lady, I've been processing the information from the reports and message sent to you by HQ. There may be a solution to your problems—or one of them at least."  
  
Samus raised her head a fraction of an inch off the control panel, feeling that nothing would be able to lift her up right now. She nodded dully, then, remembering once again that the computer couldn't see her, mumbled, "Yeah?"  
  
"According to my calculations, you aren't actually required to stay here."  
  
"What?" Samus knew she shouldn't be tempted. It seemed that right now it was hope after false hope; she didn't think she could bear another letdown. Still...  
  
"Legally, when you quit your job in the federation police and took the title bounty hunter, you severed all direct ties to the federation—except those of galactic law, of course. Galactic law does require all citizens to obey any COMMAND given by an HQ official. However, the galactic standard dictionary defines the word 'request' as 'to ask as a favor or privilege'. In your message from HQ, the word used was request."  
  
"...You mean..."  
  
"You weren't commanded to stay here, you were requested; although the command was implied. That means that it is up to you to choose whether to obey or not. Although," the computer added, "I doubt the federation would see it that way."  
  
"To heck with the federation," Samus replied. Something was rising in her chest, a feeling that was impossible to describe—like soaring, like enlightenment, like finding something vital that you've overlooked. Free. She was free.  
  
A new emotion had seized ahold of her and couldn't be shaken. Samus hadn't taken on metroids...Mother Brain ...space pirates ...the X parasites...she hadn't triumphed over them all by sheer physical strength. It was when she was like this that Samus was the most dangerous.  
  
"ADAM, fire the engines. I'm not wasting any more time in this dump."  
  
The look of raw determination on Samus's face would have made Arastrough from HQ break out in cold sweat. She sat up and gripped the controls as the console blinked into life around her and the protective paneling slid back from around the front view portal. She was going to find the truth—and anything that stood in her path would not be standing for long.  
  
(to my reviewers— Rougue: heh heh...it probably wasn't hard to guess. In my opinion, Adam shouldn't have died! and that's what fanfics are for—to let you use those great characters the way you think they should be... J. Rolande: thanks! This chapter I tried to add more emotion, like you said. In the rough draft it wasn't as descriptive. 


	4. Hunter, Hunted

(A/N: Big SORRY to all my reviewers for not updating in so long. Research paper now successfully written, although the whole project is not yet complete, which gives me some free time. Once again, thanks!  
  
The next few chapters are going to be mostly classic Metroid adventure with a little mystery/suspense type stuff, not a lot of emotion. (I may be awful at making action sound good, but...) For romance lovers, don't worry, I haven't forgotten it! it will just be a long way off, as the story is mostly about...well, let the story tell you that.  
  
Quick note: when the regular sign is after a section in the body of the story, it usually means a perspective change. When is used it means flashback. I think its annoying to write out flashback for some reason.)  
  
IV : Hunter, Hunted  
  
Matthew Arastrough had a problem. A very large problem. It was in the form of a sleek silver ship hurtling through space a couple thousand miles from planet Aressus, where it should've been.  
  
A frown plastered on his face, Arastrough found the link and opened a com to the silver craft's computer. He waited for a minute, then the face of the ship's pilot appeared on the screen—or rather, the helmet and armored torso. Arastrough was vaguely alarmed to see that the woman he was supposed to be controlling had already changed into her power suit.  
  
"Ms. Aran," he began, "You were ordered—"  
  
"I was requested," Samus said, in a voice that sounded as though there were a very evil grin underneath that visor. "And requests can be denied." Arastrough opened his mouth to protest, but the screen went black. "Link terminated," his computer said blandly. Arastrough frowned. He was almost sure he had seen the bounty hunter make a very rude gesture at the screen a moment before it flicked off.  
  
Shaking his head, he opened another link, this time to a branch of the high security quarters at the docking bays across from the government buildings.  
The other end was opened immediately.  
  
"What now, Arastrough?" The voice was a sharp, slightly hissing tone, extremely unlike the dully profession voices of the officials; a voice alive with undertones and half-hidden expressions. Arastrough shivered in spite of himself. His new ally could be a bit...creepy.  
  
"This may be inconvenient timing. However—"  
  
"No, it's just fine with me. It gets boring in here with nothing to do."  
  
"However," Arastrough, not used to being interrupted, continued slightly annoyed. "I need you to leave for Kelta-Z now. On the way, should you encounter the bounty hunter, you must see to it that she does not reach the moon."  
  
A smile cracked the reptilian mouth of the face on the screen, revealing pointed teeth. "My pleasure," yeldiR said dryly.  
  
The slight hum of the instruments filled the silence in the control room of the silver ship, giving it a feeling of life and breath. Samus stared up at the stars dotting the infinite void of space. She spent much of her time of solid ground; but the cockpit of a spacecraft, with the controls in her hands and the open darkness all around, still seemed like home.  
  
ADAM, which had been conducting a search of all possible destinations and space pirate ships by elimination, had been silent. Now it whirred into life. "Lady, the scanners have found no less than fifteen space pirate ships in the area of HQ's data reception satellites. I can tune into the satellites' data and search for key messages."  
  
Samus nodded, then rolled her eyes and said, "Sure. Thanks." She had to get a modification that allowed the computer to recognize motion cues. This was getting annoying.  
  
A moment later, ADAM said, "Messages containing the key words and pictures were picked up by one satellite two days ago. Should I trace them to origin/destination?"  
  
Samus shrugged. "Fine. And you can stop asking me. Just do what it takes to find Adam and sort out this whole mess."  
  
A few more minutes. "Lady—we've got trouble," the computer said. "Routine scanning of the ship revealed a federation tracer frequency focused on us. Disabling this may prove extremely difficult. We would have to shut down the search system—"  
  
Its words were interrupted by a bleep from one of the instruments. Samus looked down and frowned beneath her visor. "Don't bother. Keep searching—we're going to need a place to land. They're already following us."  
  
The ship was federation-issue grey, small and unadorned. Neither its advanced weaponry nor its quickness and modern design made it dangerous. What supplied that factor was the pilot.  
  
YeldiR grinned to himself at the prospect of what lay ahead. He had a plan. This was perfect.  
  
Samus stared at the readout on the control panel. "Crap," she said. "Our friend 'yeldiR' seems to be on his way."  
  
ADAM didn't reply to the comment; it was too busy calculating. "Lady, the sending ship seems to have been headed for one of the larger moons of Sephaniza Matrim. Apparently they have set up a base on a widely orbiting planetoid called Kelta-Z."  
  
"Then that's where we need to go," Samus said. "Set the ship to revert to the quickest route there as soon as I stop manual control."  
  
"Going the quickest way would entail flying straight through an asteroid belt, Lady."  
  
"Like I said, whatever we need to do...right now I need to try and get away from that other ship before it's—"  
  
A sudden shock rocked the craft's balance, sending a jolt up through Samus's legs. Alarm signals went off and a warning readout flashed across the computer screen.  
  
"—too late." Samus tightened her grip on the controls and turned around in her seat, the protective barriers on the back half of the cockpit sliding back to give her 360 degrees of clear vision. "All right, you lizard-faced little bastard," she growled, "if it's a fight you want then that's what you're going to get. Nobody's shot me out of the sky yet, and I mean to keep it that way."  
  
The silver ship's engines roared into life, preparing to propel the craft toward the nearest asteroid belt. One held; the other, however, made an alarming clanking noise and sputtered out. Samus swore as she took the time to look at the readout on the screen: **RIGHT PRIMARY ENGINE DAMAGED. AUXILIARY POWER INITIATED.**  
  
A quick look out the back of the cockpit told her all she needed to know. Samus jammed the controls to the side, the silver craft tilting and sliding under the pursuing grey ship. ADAM seemed concerned. "Lady," it admonished, "This is no time for fancy tricks. What you need to focus on is staying alive."  
  
Samus stared at the computer in the navigation room. "Move quickly, and stay alive...That's an order. Any objections, Lady?"  
  
She nodded blankly, everything blown away. The computer...it sounded just like Adam. Not the same computer that had withheld information that was vital to survival. On that would go directly against orders, and face the consequences, for the sake of the universe. For her.  
  
"None, sir," Samus replied.  
  
Move quickly, and stay alive... Samus remembered the words only too well. Her mind twinged in warning. She might be treating this like a game; but just below the surface, everything in her knew that it was dead serious.  
  
As her ship swerved to the side, Samus swiveled the cannons and pushed the button into taking mode. She looked up just quick enough to avoid an asteroid hurtling toward the cockpit, slamming the controls hard to the left. Samus winced as it wobbled a little on the backup engine, but the cutting-edge technology kept the ship on course relatively well.  
  
YeldiR smiled and gave his ship the command to fire as necessary. The ion cannons opened up and began to charge, and his smile turned into a wide- mouthed grin as an asteroid directly in his path exploded with one blast, sending pieces showering over the cockpit. The silver ship was straight ahead, weaving a tantalizing path through the asteroids. The cannons opened fire.  
  
Samus saw it coming and streaked behind an asteroid, feeling the shock as it was pulverized behind her, the leftover radiation making all her instruments go momentarily haywire. The second they returned to normal she shot a volley of concentrated energy blasts in the general direction of the grey ship behind her, keeping an erratic pattern through the asteroids now flying all around.  
  
YeldiR dodged and dipped down lower with a twisting dive, using his radar steering to keep from colliding with the asteroids in his path. He cleared the distance between his ship and his opponent's and kept ahead as Samus copied the manuever, the silver craft lilting slightly to the right. YeldiR switched his weapons and fired backwards.  
  
Samus dodged the missle easily, but it swerved around in a tight arc and headed back towards her. A homing missle, almost certainly packed with enough power to vaporize her entire spacecraft.  
  
The engines roared into speed as Samus slammed on the thrust, sending her ship streaking through the air straight beneath yeldiR's. With the view obscured in a blur of motion, she navigated blindly, jerking the controls back savagely and feeling the response as the false gravity in her ship suddenly changed planes.  
  
The silver ship tilted sharply up in a breakneck curve, desribing a complete loop around the grey craft. The missle, with its inexorable logic that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, chose the shortest path to its target.  
  
Unfortuntely for yeldiR, something was in the way.  
  
Samus saw the explosion dizzily from upside-down, completing the loop a moment later and sliding back into the normal gravity status. The smoke cleared, but there was no sign of the federation ship.  
  
She sat back, breathing heavily, not from exertion but exhileration. Once, Samus might've taken time to calm her heartbeat; but after being a bounty hunter for so long—hunter and hunted—she had learned to control every slight reaction. On planetside she could afford fits of emotion; here, no one cared if you were so angry that you accidentally crashed into an asteroid and killed yourself.  
  
ADAM spoke up for the first time since yeldiR had fired at them. "Lady, course set for Kelta-Z. Estimated arrival time 10 minutes."  
  
"Good," Samus said, her face grim as she glanced at the readout screen once more. "The engine looks pretty bad. Auxiliary power isn't designed to hold out very long." And knowing yeldiR, he had some trick up his filthy sleeve.  
  
The next ten minutes were nerve-wracking. Samus concentrated on the instruments, searching for signs of further damage. She knew that if she hadn't, she would've been looking back every moment, trying to find yelidiR's ship. Samus might've been happier if he had showed up and tried to bombard her with lazer fire; as it was, the stillness translated itself into an uneasy, watchful calm. All of her senses were telling her that something was waiting to happen.  
  
ADAM finally broke the silence once more as the huge red planet Sephaniza Matrim began to grow in the corner of the view portal. "The moon Kelta-Z is straight ahead," it told her.  
  
Samus squinted at cockpit window, and finally made out an indistinct spherical shape, of the same material as the planet. She could immediately see why it was a potential space pirate base: it was situated by a hostile, barren desert planet next to which it was both easily camoflagued and insignificant in size.  
  
As she got nearer, the surface of the moon filled the view portal—unremarkable, craggy and pockmarked, probably just a huge chunk of Sephaniza Matrim carved out of the planet eons ago.  
  
The silver ship fired its engines,a little unstable on backup, and dove into the gaseous atmosphere of Kelta-Z.  
  
YeldiR, in the badly damaged federation ship, turned off his state-of-the- art cloaking device and followed her. He wasn't laughing any more. Let the Hunter think she'd won. His plan...  
  
_Aran crashed on Kelta-Z,_ he typed into his message unit. _I'm going in there. If I find her alive, I'm sure your government can deal with her—I'm guessing treason doesn't go over well in such a well-developed socitey. There's no better chance to start my work, so I'll simply continue and be on the lookout for our rebel. –Yeldir  
_  
(by the way, sorry about the short chapter last time. I had always intended to make chapter three a short one; but I was just reading it one time and realized it really was too short. Maybe I'll change that sometime...but in the meantime, I'd better get on with all my cliffie chapters. See you next mission!) 


	5. Arrival

(Yay! Thanks for all the good results, people. If I'm encouraged, I might get on updating...nah, just kidding. I do this as much for myself as for my reviewers—the games do Samus no justice.  
  
There might have been some confusion in my last chapter, as the computer took all my nice little symbols—the ones that divided up the sections—completely out of the text. I will try to fix that.  
  
Once again, thanks. Now I'd better start the fic and stop blabbing.)  
  
V: Arrival  
  
Samus peered at the cratered landscape of Kelta-Z. There appeared to be no life, but she of all people knew that looks could be deceiving.  
  
She charged up a beam on her cannon, ready for danger, and propelled herself into the air, spin-jumping from the ledge she was standing on to the dusty ground below. Her screw attack protected her in the air, but who knew what was lurking just behind that rock formation...  
  
As it turned out, nothing. With the craggy red rock at her back, Samus turned back toward the high outcropping upon which she had hidden her ship. Good. Nothing could be seen of the shining silver craft. It would be difficult for any enemies to find what could possibly be her only way off the desolate surface of the moon.  
  
Her steps crunched dryly on the pebbly red earth as Samus set out away from the ship, marking it carefully on her helmet's mapping system before beginning to move. The combat visor was calculating her surroundings, searching for both potential ways into the space pirate base and harmful native organisms.  
  
A warning signal flashed across her eyes, and the earth in front of her suddenly crumbled in with a soft sucking noise. Samus jumped back, narrowly avoiding a huge reptilian head that shot out of the surface, fanged jaws snapping at the place she had been just a moment before. When they closed on empty air, the creature withdrew halfway and flopped around on the earth, dragging its huge jaws across the red pebbles around the hole.  
  
It didn't seem to have a body; any limbs were down lower in the hole. Where its eyes should have been, there were only shallow shaded pits. But the lack was more than made up for by the size of the jaw, which was heavily snakelike and surrounded by large, spade-shaped scaly projections.  
  
Samus aimed her cannon and fired, but the shots only bounced off the creature's earth-caked, slightly oozing hide. Alerted to the whereabouts of its prey, the head swung around and lunged at Samus, gaping mouth showing rows of misshapen teeth. Without thinking, Samus flicked the controls and fired three missles into its open jaws.  
  
The creature let out a half-gurgle, half-scream and flailed around madly, pulling its head back under the surface with a rumble. The next moment, the earth underneath Samus shook with a muted roar, as something huge went churning off straight beneath her feet. After only a few seconds it faded away again, leaving a shaken bounty hunter staring at the now-empty hole.  
  
Her scan visor finished calculating and the in-helmet computer spoke up. 'Tunneling snakeworm. Snakeworms dig tunnels beneath the earth while searching for prey, which they detect using extremely sensitive, vibration- sensing fibers on their bodies. After a large meal, a snakeworm may hibernate for up to six years. Their jaws and rotating-plate scales, which they use to propel themselves through the earth, can crush almost anything. The body of a snakeworm is extremely well protected, but its mouth is susceptible to most attacks.'  
  
"Now you tell me," Samus muttered.  
  
She continued past the hole, her visor adding the spot to her small but growing map of Kelta-Z. Nothing else seemed to be moving in the landscape, but Samus kept her eyes peeled for any hint of another living thing. She knew she had limited time to search; from what ADAM had told her, the moon was only about two-thirds the size of earth, with an average daylight span of only nine galactic standard hours.  
  
Three hours later, she trudged back toward the high place her ship was on, not physically tired but mentally at a loss. The sun had already disappeared behind the bulk of Sephaniza Matrim, and the only thing Samus had found was an abundance of small, scaly black batlike creatures. They seemed to center on her as a potential food source, and though their pitiful dives at her weren't enough to take any energy from her tanks, it was beginning to get annoying.  
  
With a new sense of purpose, however temporary, Samus headed to where the bats were coming from, trying to figure out where their lowly hovels were so she could at least vent a little frustration. In a few minutes, she had been led to a place where a large plateau was cut off into a twenty-foot high, slightly sloped cliff.  
  
The rock face was scarred with hundreds of crags and pockmarks, from each of which bats issued in fluttering flurries. Samus scowled. There was no way she was going to exterminate this infestation. Well, she thought, brightening, she could at least end the misery of a few of the beasts...not as if it would hurt a population this size...  
  
Stepping closer to the cliff, Samus was assailed by even more bats than ever. One flapped up to her visor and hovered there, little shiny bulging eyes seeming to bore into her own. A number of tiny shapes zipped around it; for a moment, she thought they were an insect of some kind, then realized they were miniature versions of the already small bat.  
  
It's a mother, Samus thought, a kind of ache deadening her urge to kill the annoying creatures. The bat stared at her for a while longer, then flew off into the dark, closely followed by the babies. Not disappointed, but feeling more confused than ever, she turned to leave, taking one last look at the thousands of bats streaming out of every available crack...  
  
Wait a minute. That wasn't quite true. There was one crevice, about halfway up, which seemed to be empty. Looking up and focusing her scan visor on the place, Samus peered more closely at it.  
  
A picture appeared to one corner of her visor. 'Titanium tubing,' the voice from her computer said. 'Airflow detected. Probably a ventilation shaft.'  
  
"Bingo," Samus said.  
  
She spin-jumped from ledge to ledge, careful not to activate her screw attack so the bats would remain unharmed, until she found a ledge close enough to the vent to stand on.  
  
At the place, she examined the small hole, loath to bomb the area. It was far too small to fit into, even with morph ball, and the scan visor would have told her if the ground were weak...  
  
The little voice in the bottom of her mind stirred. Excuses, excuses. If you really wanted to, you would bomb the place anyway. The scan visor doesn't know everything, Samus. Are the bats' lives worth your goal?  
  
Samus shook her head fiercely, as if to clear the thought from her head. Sour disappointment coursed through her stomach as she turned herself, with an effort of will, away from the lead and trudged back towards her ship.  
  
She kept an eye out for danger, even though she had so far encountered nothing threatening but the snakeworm. It was something she could concentrate on, other than her strange unwillingness to sacrifice a few bats. Were they any different than the other creatures she had mercilessly killed in her zeal to exterminate the metroids and destroy the space pirates? Many of them had probably had their own young, just the same...  
  
Samus bit back a startled cry as her foot slipped and slid downwards with a clatter of moving pebbles. Grateful for the distraction from her own troubled thoughts, she switched her visor to night-vision and surveyed what she had stepped in.  
  
The hole was about three feet in diameter, although slightly caved in...a moment later, she leapt back with a mild explanation. The snakeworm hole! What if the worm was still there, lurking just under her feet? Samus tensed her muscles, ready to jump, then froze, forcing herself to think about the situation.  
  
Of course it wouldn't be. She was being paranoid. It was probably long gone in search of larger prey...although, with this ecosystem, there probably was nothing large enough to make more vibrations than she did. What could there be...? Her train of thought progressed rapidly.  
  
It made sense, Samus thought with growing dread. After all, if one very- light-footed woman could activate its sensors, how much more...it had probably been asleep for years, so they wouldn't have known...its jaws would've been powerful enough...  
  
A fresh wave of resolve swept through Samus's body. No fear. If there was any way into the space pirate base, she would find it. Whatever the cost.  
  
This is suicide, said that one tiny voice.  
  
"For Adam," Samus told it fiercely. Then she rolled into morph ball and went down into the hole.  
  
Years' worth of federation scientists had still not figured out how exactly the Chozo had built the power suit. Samus suspected they had used something akin to a periscope to allow her to see in morph ball form; but as of now, if it worked, she didn't care how.  
  
It was dark in the tunnel, although the lights radiating from her energy tanks—another useful Chozo ingeniousness—lessened the gloom somewhat. Samus could feel vaguely the dirt being flung up behind her as she rolled along. The ground beneath the surface of Kelta-Z was no more soft of wet than at the top.  
  
She kept going, seeing nothing other than grim crumbling earth. It was deathly quiet. Then she turned a sharp angle and came upon a place where two wormholes crossed.  
  
She hadn't expected this. She always tried not to imagine what might happen in places like this—it only induced fear. But that meant she was more easily surprised.  
  
Samus now had three paths to choose from—one going to the left and down, one to the right and slightly up, and the one she was on, which slanted slightly down in front of her. She checked her map. If the ventilation shaft was one way, she had probably take the path leading nearest to it... A quick look, and the morph ball jumped up slightly and followed the right- hand tunnel.  
  
She didn't know how long she had been going before disaster struck. It started with a tiny vibration—just an earth tremor, she thought at first. But it didn't stop. A warning flashed across her vision.  
  
"Oh, crap," Samus said.  
  
'Vibrations from behind,' her helmet computer told her blandly.  
  
Without a second thought, Samus began rolling as fast as she could down the tunnel. She only hoped it was the right one...  
  
The earth was shaking. Showers of pebbles and dust pelted the morph ball's sides as Samus fled, acutely aware of how defenseless she was. Bombs could only do so much...  
  
Every thought fled her mind as the side of the tunnel burst out behind her, exploding with a hail of dirt. A huge head plowed across the passage, rotating-plate scales driving earth before it with a roar, like a gigantic drill. A moment later, the head disappeared in the earth on the other side, drawing its long segmented body in after it. Samus stayed still, and it to was obscured by the dirt...  
  
The next moment pain seared her body as the head erupted from the tunnel next to her, snapping at the air where she had been. A rotating scale had clipped the side of the morph ball, sending her tumbling down the tunnel.  
  
The snakeworm shrieked and pulled its whole body back into the tunnel, thundering down after its escaping prey. Samus hardly knew she was rolling. Pain was flowing across her curled-up body in waves, traveling like liquid fire through every muscle and bone. She held on to one thought to keep from passing out. Keep going. If you stop, it will be a thousand times worse. Keep going. Keep going.  
  
Adam...  
  
Samus pushed the morph ball faster, racing down the tunnel at top speed. The snakeworm threw itself out through the wall and came back in from the side, snapping and roaring. She kept rolling, leaving a string of bombs behind her, passing numerous tunnel-openings to the left and right. Nothing mattered now but flight.  
  
The ground was beginning to hum and vibrate. What now? Samus thought. It could be nothing good. But—  
  
Light. Light was streaming down into the tunnel. Not the red sunlight of Kelta-Z, but a harsh, white, hospital-room light. Samus heard the crackle of electricity, felt it pulsing through her suit. There was a wall ahead, strange and sudden in the earthy darkness—a wall with a hole in it.  
  
Collapsed rubble lay all around. The snakeworm had tried to invade here. But why hadn't it succeeded? Samus didn't care. Somewhere...anywhere she could get away... A moment after she raced through the opening, she knew why. The worm following her screamed, and so did Samus. Electricity crackled around her, searing through the power suit savagely, and pain lanced through her body, coursing across, around, and inside...  
  
With a desperate burst of speed, she flung herself out of it, rolling to the ground a few feet away. It was a room, not a tunnel. Samus's tortured muscles couldn't hold her in morph ball form any longer; she uncurled and flopped dizzily on the mercifully cool, smooth floor. After the darkness, the sudden brilliance hurt her eyes... or was that the electricity? She couldn't tell.  
  
Laying there on the ground, the feeling slowly returning to her limbs, it finally dawned on Samus. She was in the space pirate base. She had made it.  
  
(Review response—  
  
Axa: thanks. You can probably find information about Metroid on the internet. How did you find out about my love of Warriors, though?  
  
To all my faithful reviewers (no, I haven't forgotten you.): I can't thank you enough for your response to my fic. The criticism really helps. On summer break now, which means I can hopefully update more frequently. See you next chapter!) 


	6. Denial

(Wow! I'm surprised I made it to 20 reviews, even past! So, I'll get writing. Updating might still be slow, due to a billion other things to do, but summer break helps a ton. Aaaand—the adventure continues!)  
  
{} {} {}  
  
VI: Denial  
  
_I'm inside the base. There had been no sign of Aran, but I'll keep an eye out for her. The space pirates suspect nothing—dull-witted creatures. When there's more to report, I'll do so. –Yeldir  
_  
YeldiR activated the 'send' command on his wrist-PC, the one the federation had given him to contact them. Then he turned around in the command room, ready to check up on one of his numerous experiments.  
  
A bleep from one of the view screens in front of him made him turn back to look. Trust the space pirates to have done something stupid—and then come whining to him about it. Well, he wasn't their leader for nothing...  
  
Sure enough, it was one of those twisted, sneering faces that stared at him from the screen. "Sir, there's been an explosion in the main generator room. We think a native organism may have tried to break in. A few electrical nodes have been damaged—nothing major."  
  
YeldiR nodded his head impatiently. "Do whatever you need to do. Ask the 'commander' if the electricians can't figure out such high-level work...in fact, I'll send him down now." A perfect opportunity...  
  
The pirate nodded, oblivious to the insult, and the screen shut off. Once more, yeldiR swiveled around to face a door in the back of the command room. "001," he called, "I need you to oversee the electricians figuring out a generator problem. They're in the main room—B5A."  
  
A man's voice answered from an adjacent room. "All right. I'll see what I can do, sir." A few moments later, the speaker walked past yeldiR on his way to the generator room.  
  
He was a human, very tall, wearing a nondescript white suit with a very high collar. His hair was naturally grey-brown, giving him the look of an older man. He had grey eyes that seemed focused a bit further than reality, and a slight frown creased his brow.  
  
YeldiR smiled acidly. "Good."  
  
{} {} {}  
  
Samus opened her eyes. She hadn't been aware of passing out. Disoriented for a moment, she blinked and stared around, then memory flooded back. The snakeworm, the electricity, the pain... Suddenly realizing the vulnerability of her position, Samus stood up, slowly, and looked around. She felt just a slight ache in her muscles; the power suit had healed the worst of her injuries. The enemies' attacks didn't take energy directly from her tanks; it was healing her body that used the power.  
  
Samus checked her suit's status, wincing a little when she saw that two full energy tanks had been drained. In proportion, that wasn't much, but two energy tanks could mean life or death when you were fighting hordes of merciless space pirates. Speaking of which... they would probably have noticed those broken generators by now.  
  
She crept along the wall until she reached a portal, which winked, bluish, at the entrance to the room. No noise seemed to be coming from the outside—but it was always hard to tell with these types of things. Normally, Samus might've simply shot the thing and barged through, but this time she actually had to find something before blowing the station up.  
  
Finally, she shot the portal, peered through, and slipped out into the corridor that was revealed. She surveyed her surroundings; then, at the warning symbol flashing across her visor, she rolled into morph ball and ducked behind a pipe across the hallway as a group of space pirates came clattering down the passage. She had just gotten out of the room in time—they turned into the entrance she had exited a few moments ago.  
  
Samus's viewpoint from morph ball was limited because of her height, but something in the groups' attire didn't seem to fit in. It was as if there was another being in the center of the mob... Her gut twisted unpleasantly, but the thought was fleeting. She was being unreasonable.  
  
When the last pirate had disappeared through the hatch, Samus cautiously uncurled and looked around. The group had come from the right of the portal—what would they have been doing before? They were probably fixing the generator...which meant they'd need tools...which meant there just MIGHT be a supply room somewhere in that general direction. If they'd gotten supplies first, that is; if not they may have come from some place where they could be commanded or contact a leader.  
  
Probably, might, somewhere, if, or. Too many undecideds. But they had to have come from somewhere, Samus reasoned; it was as good a guess as any. She continued up the passageway from where the group had come.  
  
It wove and twisted, probably because of natural boundaries. Doors opened up to the left and right; Samus kept exploring, going by her basic standby—you could always go back later. Space pirates were everywhere. Samus found herself looking longingly back at the days when she could kill any pirate she wanted, any she saw...but this was different. She must not be noticed.  
  
She turned back from another dead end, checking her map for places she hadn't explored, and something caught her eye. It seemed she was just below the ventilation shaft she had noticed earlier. Making sure that no space pirates were around, Samus switched to her scan visor and panned the small room.  
  
There. A small covered panel with a slight airflow. The covering was weak; a missile blow would shatter it. And it looked like the morph ball would fit in.  
  
Samus tried hard not to remember her last experience in morph ball.  
  
But in the end that was the deciding factor. If there was another way out of this dang place than the snakeworm hole, she was going to find it. The explosion might attract some pirates, so she would have to work fast. Samus fired a missile at the grate, rolled into morph ball, and once again found herself in a cramped, dark space. The dust and metal pieces from the explosion settled behind her as she bomb-jumped up the shaft, trying to find level ground.  
  
She winced at every explosion, although she knew the pirates wouldn't be able to come up after her. They could still hear... Finally, a ledge ahead showed the end of the long shaft. Samus stayed still at the top and checked her map. The passage seemed to be heading straight for the opening.  
  
She looked at her map again. Just a meter forward... then she was at the end, peering out into the soft darkness of Kelta-Z's night through the tiny grate. It was almost certainly as weak as the one she had come in through; space pirate constructions were uniform in that kind of way. That meant if she could bring herself to bomb it, she would likely be able to get out.  
  
If she could bring herself to bomb it. Samus swallowed guiltily, remembering the bats. Still... It wouldn't make such an impact from the inside, would it? She would have to try. Almost wishing there was no shaft there, she lay a bomb and let it explode.  
  
The earth beneath her crumbled and Samus fell.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
YeldiR frowned, the expression twisting his scaly face into a toothy grimace. Something in his plan wasn't working. His project was doing fine; better, in fact, than expected. But the view screen he had been monitoring intensely had shown no signs of anything entering the area it was focused on.  
  
He shook his head, one sharp claw tracing a delicate line on the control panel it was tapping. It was 001 who had thought of this particular aspect of the plan; yeldiR was best at having the idea—brilliant ones, if he could say so himself—preferring to let his underlings work out the fine print. He had enough work to do as it was.  
  
Suddenly, a motion on the screen caught his eye. Was it...? Yes. Oh, yes.  
  
YeldiR commed the generator room. "001, I need you to get five ZE squads up to console B14. Now."  
  
"Yes, sir," the man said.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
_Crap,_ Samus thought, _crap, crap, crap_. Her micro-tuned reflexes made her uncurl immediately in the air, hitting the ground an instant later. The moment her feet were stable, she spun a whiplash circle in place, searching the area she had fallen into for enemies. But she was in luck--the room seemed to be empty. Samus's rapid heartbeat slowed as she surveyed her surroundings more closely. She had seen too many trick blocks leading to giant creatures bent on her destruction for comfort.  
  
It was a small place, a few meters across at the most, squarish and with only one entrance other than the jagged hole in the ceiling that she had fallen through. She stared up at it, wondering... the ventilation shaft must've been directly above the ceiling of the room and too weak to hold up under her bomb blast. Typical space pirate construction.  
  
Finally, a panel along the right-hand wall caught her attention. Samus stared. This was beyond reason, beyond hope. It was an empty computer console—maybe an alternate way of reaching a leader from an isolated part of the base. Still cautious, she switched to her scan visor and searched carefully for traps, in all the settings; finding none, Samus turned on the combat visor once again, for alert, and set the fingers of her left hand to the keyboard.  
  
Long experience of hacking while in the power suit had taught her to type quickly with only one hand. She wasn't quite sure how long she stood there, hunched over the panel, brow furrowed in concentration behind her visor. But space pirate computer systems obviously weren't built with security focus in mind.  
  
Mainframe database...station's log...search...keyword(s)... Samus entered the information and scrolled down the results. Somewhere she registered the fact that her hand was shaking, but that didn't matter. Nothing mattered. She wouldn't have noticed if the room had come crashing down around her, if a squad of screeching space pirates had burst in.  
  
Nothing mattered.  
  
There were several entries that had the words she was searching for in proliferation, and Samus selected the one that was of the earliest date. The log entry popped up in a second, and she began to read...  
  
No. This must be wrong. Samus shook her head slowly, feeling her mind lock down, as if to shut out the information. No...  
  
_Contacted by a man from federation today. Top HQ official, name of Adam Malkovich. Very interested in the power we're gaining. Offered services in return for a share in any profits. Debating how to leave federation's hold without suspicion...  
  
_Samus blinked, as if by closing her eyes to the offensive matter it would go away. As if by closing her eyes, she would wake up and this would all be a dream—a nightmare that she could just shake off, and return to her normal, unmuddled life.  
  
She had wished so long for Adam to be somehow, miraculously, alive; now, she thought bitterly, it would have been so much easier if he had just stayed 'dead.' Comfortably, unquestionably dead. At least that meant he had been a good person, without a shadow of doubt...the person she had thought he was.  
  
_Maybe_, Samus reasoned, _life would be better if we all just didn't_ _think_.  
  
She finally forced herself to move, her footsteps seeming to float, every sound and action taking on a dreamlike unreality. She had done what she had come to do, something said, so why not leave; but it too felt fuzzy and tired. The trip across the room to the portal was an eternity, experienced blindly—don't think, and it will all go away.  
  
Then, just as she reached the exit, it was opened from the outside.  
  
A horde of leering space pirates trouped in with lightning speed, claws clicking maniacally. It was only a matter of seconds before they had her surrounded, dozens of red eyes gleaming with deep-rooted hatred and not a little fear. Still wary, they closed in, ready to leap back the moment she attacked. But the Hunter was eerily, unreally still.  
  
She didn't care anymore.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
(just a footnote—don't worry, I do like happy endings.  
  
Merry waiting for the next chapter!) 


	7. The Dragon's Tongue

(I know I left you people hanging, so as you can see I'm working on updating. heh heh heh. You all just wait and see...poor Samus. I do terrible things with/to characters' minds, don't I? )  
  
{} {} {}  
  
VII: The Dragon's Tongue  
  
Reptilian, lidless eyes watched the strange procession on the view screen as it filed through the passageways toward the cell room. The pirate escort looked distinctly nervous at first, but as the journey proceeded and the Hunter showed no signs of attacking—indeed, no signs that she was aware of their presence—they relaxed enough to hiss and squawk, gossip-like, in their own language.  
  
YeldiR frowned, a tinge of something almost akin to regret dampening his success. Seeing his old enemy...broken...like this was something he had never expected, never thought about. The grudging respect Samus had always held for him was mutual; yeldiR had a strange urge to turn his face from the scene, though it symbolized his victory.  
  
_Gah,_ he thought. _I must be getting old—old and soft._ He was far too busy to sit around making a fuss over some poor piece of bait.  
  
"001!" he called back into the room, "Get over here. I have something to show you."  
  
The man walked over to stand by his master at the view screen, his boots tapping softly on the synthetic-tile floor. "Yes, sir?"  
  
YeldiR pointed out the orange-clad figure in the middle of the group of pirates, his claw clicking slightly as it touched the screen. "This being," he said, putting deliberate emphasis on the words, "Is an enemy. It seeks to destroy all we've worked for. Any time you should see it or detect it here in any way, you must send out best troops to stop it. It is very powerful." _Not that it would be around much longer._  
  
The man blinked, his lips half-repeating the words. His brow furrowed as if in concentration; when he finally spoke, the words came out as a croak. "It?" he said, "'It' seems feminine..." He gritted his teeth, sweat breaking out on his forehead. "I...think... I've seen it..._her_...before—"  
  
One of yeldiR's clawed hands shot to the man's shoulder, twisting him away from the view screen. The other twitched a dial on a small, plastic rectangular object sitting in front of him on the control panel.  
  
There was a beep, and a glitter of flashing lights on the box. Then the man's face smoothed out, his words stopping in mid-sentence, and he closed his eyes, one hand automatically reaching up to brush the perspiration from his forehead. When he opened them again, they held no trace of the faint spark of comprehension that had been in them.  
  
YeldiR turned back to the view screen, ordering the man back into the recesses of the command room. That had been far too close.  
  
It would not happen again.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
Samus felt oddly displaced from the world around her, numb, as if she were viewing the whole thing from the eyes of another being. One that was insensitive to pain, deadened to emotion, preferably.  
  
The space pirates walked on, clacking their claws derisively, as though they had something to boast about. In their center, the armored figure's legs worked mechanically, propelling her forward for a lack of anything better to do.  
  
Her brain was finally chewing its way through the information it had been fed, processing it—rejecting it. The logic in her mind told her it was sensible, applicable, true. But, further down, blatant rebellion ran rampant.  
  
Adam wouldn't do that. She repeated it to herself like a mantra, even as the information sifted through her mind's filters. There had been something strange about the data log entries, something about the way she found the room, the attack of the pirates. Like a scene from a bad mystery—unreal, choreographed. But if there was some clue, it kept slipping away.  
  
An abrupt halt to the rhythmic tapping of space pirate feet ahead of her sent Samus plowing into the creature ahead of her. It squawked, whirled around, and attacked, thinking to defend itself from what it was sure was an attempt on its life. And, for once in her career, she wasn't ready. The beams from its claw-lasers struck her full on, sending a bolt of pain lancing through her body. A cry reverberated through her helmet—her own. Suddenly, Samus saw her situation clearly, as if for the first time. Here she was—Samus Aran, surrounded by space pirates and being led to who-knows- where, succumbing as docilely as a pet! What was she doing?!  
  
Her survival instincts took over, forgetting for the time being all that had just occurred. Samus leapt into the air as the pirate fired again, curling her body into a spin-jump position, and sailed back down, expecting to hear the pirates' screams as her screw attack fried them.  
  
Nothing happened.  
  
She landed back on the floor, head pounding, and tried her beam cannon, missles. Unresponsive. Desperate, Samus rolled into morph ball and streaked down the hallway, not even trying to use her bombs. The tramp of space pirate feet was clearly audible behind her, along with the hisses of...something...they were firing at her. She didn't want to find out, personally.  
  
Then she felt a tiny pinprick in her back, like an insect's bite. The world spun out of control, bellyflopped like a dead fish, and collapsed into darkness.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
Something was tickling the back of her neck. Samus blinked blearily, and felt her eyelashes brush against the floor.  
  
Instantly awake, she tried to leap up from her splayed position, only to discover that the world tipped dizzily with every motion. Her limbs felt jellylike, but, with the walls pitching around her, she managed to lever her body into a half-crouch, half-kneel, hands pressed flat to the floor for balance.  
  
Gradually the swaying of the walls stopped. Samus kept her eyes on her hands—both hands, she saw groggily, without really realizing what that meant. Her hair was brushing her cheek, but if she took her hand off the ground to push the fallen ponytail back over her shoulder, the world might topple over.  
  
Slowly, like a mist lifting from around her head, Samus's mind cleared. She must have been drugged to be knocked out—that explained the confusion. Her power suit... Samus sat up slowly, relieved that the vertigo had lessened and she could move with her head swimming only a minimal amount. Her wrists were slightly sore from sitting in that position so long, but that was the least of her worries.  
  
She surveyed her mostly-suited body, reaching up with her left hand, the one she was most used to using, and running it over her exposed head and right hand. Other than the obvious—her helmet and arm cannon gone, and attacks disabled—she found that most of her suit and abilities were still functioning. She didn't need to test, now that she could concentrate; she just knew. The power suit was such an integral part of her body, reacting to her desires the same way her arms and legs did, that she could tell what was wrong with it just as well as if it were simply a second skin. Only her shock and the exhilaration of battle had kept her from noticing.  
  
Wait. Something else was wrong. An alien presence in her orderly system of power suit and body.  
  
The fingers on her right hand were almost still feeling the trigger they would normally be touching as she ran it down her arm once more. There. Right around her wrist, a metal clasp embedded firmly in her armor. That would contain a computer chip, some type of device that inhibited her direct attacks.  
  
Samus tried to pry it off with her fingers, though she knew that would have no effect. Finally, cradling her head in one hand, she took a long look at her surroundings. It _was_ interesting. Three walls—to her back and sides—seemed to make a tiny cell, or alcove, in a larger wall. The front side seemed to be open. But that made no sense. If they'd gone to all this trouble to capture her, they wouldn't just let her walk right out, would they? There had to be some trick.  
  
Still her curiosity was aroused, and Samus rose, finally steady, to her feet, ready to investigate. But she was interrupted.  
  
Samus jumped as a huge creature slammed down into the room her alcove was looking out on. A dark, reptilian creature, with a long fanged snout, clawed hands, gigantic scaly wings, glittering red eyes. He landed with an earsplitting roar, then bowed courteously to his prisoner.  
  
"Surprised you, didn't I?"  
  
Samus glared at him.  
  
"Ah, Samus Aran. I don't think we've met. Shall I introduce myself? Lord of Kelta-Z, Yeldir—"  
  
"Cut the crap, _Ridley_," Samus growled, anger bubbling up I her chest unexpectedly. "You can't be stupid enough to think I'd fall for that old trick. I know who you are. I thought I'd gotten rid of you on Tallon IV."  
  
"So you thought," Ridley smiled, "so you thought. Thinking is not everything, Aran. Some researchers from HQ gave me a hand; something about using my genetics for the common good. I believe they made a few clones while I was still recovering...however, we are avoiding the subject."  
  
Samus knew what he was talking about, and she knew that Ridley knew she did. She had been forcing herself not to think about it since she came to. But now that she was here—imprisoned, basically defenseless—there was no use hiding anything anymore.  
  
"Adam," Samus said. "What have you done to him?!"  
  
Ridley sneered. "Ah, so your devotion to dear Malkovich brought you here. Alas, your...passion...is in vain. Face it, Aran—or should I call you Samus? After all, we've known each other for so long, we may as well use first names—face it, he's not coming back for you. Yes, your pathetic little human hearts are so easily fooled—"  
  
"Liar," Samus said, knowing she was being goaded but unable to control the venom seething in her chest. Station's log or no, when _he_ said it, it was impossible to even dream of it being true. "You lie, Ridley. Of all the despicable, repulsive, dirty..."  
  
"Do I, though? You'd like to think so, wouldn't you? You'd like to think that your dear Malkovich—noble, brave-hearted Malkovich—would risk his own skin just to help you. Well, let me tell you something, Samus. Humans are scum. They're greedy, thieving power hogs. Noble deeds, will power—all things of the past. Think about it. You—an unusual, if misguided, human—you risk life and limb for them every day, and what do they do? They give you grief. They bug you with political matters and laws. They send you off on another mission without a word of thanks, then talk about you as soon as you're gone. They'll never understand you, Samus...and neither will I. Why? Why do you waste your time helping them?"  
  
He seemed in earnest for once, Samus reflected oddly, and it was more frightening than any other encounter she'd had with him. They were closer to...to understanding, to _agreement_...than they'd ever been. Than she ever wanted to be. She chose her words with care.  
  
"Sometimes...sometimes I wonder," Years of resentment welled up in her voice, making it tremble. "why I should even bother." Ridley began to smile, and opened his mouth to speak, but she took a deep breath and continued, "But then I realize I have to go on. Because I know that if the federation fails, something worse will take over. Creatures like you, Ridley. At least some people have feelings. At least there are..." Samus stumbled, choking on her words, "at least...there are some people who care." _Adam...?_  
  
"People care? People care?! They care enough to leave all their 'friends' for money and power. Samus, do you really think a top HQ official would let you—a bounty hunter, someone who kills for a living—interfere with his own personal ways of attaining power and wealth? Why should he even want to associate himself with you? Why—"  
  
An inhuman roar burst from Samus's throat and she threw herself across the gap between herself and the dragon. Power suit or no, she would rend that fiend limb from limb. This was going too far. How dare he suggest—  
  
Then a jolt of pain arced through her body and she was flung backwards from the opening to the cell, landing in a crumpled heap on the floor. She was up on her feet in an instant, wrenching her eyes open, but it was impossible for Ridley not to have seen her mistake.  
  
The dragon laughed, flexing his powerful wings with a mirthless grin on his scaly face. "Three-foot-thick wall of electric current. Totally undetectable. Walking all the way through will kill you. Now,_ Hunter_," he said, the mocking tone clearly evident in his voice, "you just think about our little chat. Okay?" Then he was gone, exiting the same way he had entered.  
  
Samus waited until the last echoes of his leaving had dissipated, then sank to her knees and collapsed.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
Behind a door in the recesses of the command room, experiment 001 tossed and turned on the cot his master had set up for him. He half-whispered unintelligible things in his sleep, eyes flicking back and forth under closed lids.  
  
The velocity of his actions increased in sharp climax, and he suddenly sat up, eyes darting open wildly with a look of rapid comprehension. As if in harmony with his actions, a panel of lights glittered into life on a white- metal half-collar mounted around the nape of his neck.  
  
The expression drained from his face, to be replaced by a frustrated scowl. "I knew it just a minute ago," he mumbled, "If I just could...remember...it was a name...and I knew...a dream, just a dream..."  
  
His face went blank then, and he sank back down and closed his eyes once more.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
Just a few meters away, Ridley sat in the control room, fiddling with HQ's PC. Finally finding the voice message function, he turned it on and began to record.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
_"Good news, sir. I've captured Aran and am holding her in the pirate base. I'd like to conclude my mission soon—there is little more information I can gather here. And to...let us say, 'shut the mouths' of any who might suspect me, I recommend that you bring as large a force as possible to annihilate the pirate body here. Valuable data I was unable to attain could then be downloaded from the station's log before backup pirate ships arrive. You could also transport our problematic bounty hunter back to the federation to administer justice. I strongly advise this course of action, although the final decision is of course up to you."  
_  
Matthew Arastrough looked at the face on the transmission screen and smiled. _Who's in control now, Aran—who's in control now?  
_  
{} {} {}  
  
(well, for once I have next to nothing to say. Rougue, thanks for not revealing anything about '001' in your review—that would really suck for future readers. I'd like everyone to please use the same consideration. Not that I worry, you guys have all been great... Well, until next chapter—happy guessing! ) 


	8. Despair

(I was going to say something here, but I forgot what it was. Ah well. that happens to me all the time, sadly. Well, on with the fic! )  
  
{} {} {}  
  
VIII : Despair  
  
Samus stared at the ceiling.  
  
It was white synthetic plaster, smooth and unlined; her eyes looked dim, almost glazed, as if she wasn't really looking at it. She was lying on her back, long legs stretched out parallel to the cell's walls, hands at her sides. To all appearances, lifeless, only the slight rise and fall of her chest indicating that she was still breathing.  
  
But behind her mask of dead, emotionless flesh, a terrible battle was raging.  
  
_Ridley is a liar, a filthy space pirate sympathizer. He's a cruel killing machine; you know that better than anyone. He can never know anything about...emotions. Caring. Friends... There's no way he could.  
  
He's reasonable, even if his motives are corrupt. Everything he says makes perfect sense. All the evidence points in one direction, yet you still try swimming against the current. Adam must be working with the space pirates; there's no other logical conclusion.  
  
--No! Adam was my friend, he was more than that.... To heck with your logic! I will never stop believing that there is some...better explanation. Something is wrong with this picture.  
  
Samus, be reasonable. Ridley speaks the truth. You heard what he said about people. It was true. You've said so yourself many times.  
  
Just because some of what he said was...true...doesn't mean all of it was! Not all people are like that. Adam wasn't—isn't like them. He understood me...he's different! I know him! You...you will never convince me otherwise!  
  
Look, Samus, I know how you feel. He fooled me for a long time too. But that was then. Sometimes...you aren't perfect. Just admit it—Adam isn't the person you thought he was.  
  
That...may...be...  
  
You have to face it sometime. You made a mistake, Samus, that's all. It's time to put it behind you and move on. There's work to be done here. About Ridley...  
  
You know what?! I'm tired of this! As long as I...believe...what you said—then there's no point in trying to do anything. I'm damn well forfeit! If—as you're so bent on convincing me—nobody cares about me, why should I care about myself? Why should I care about them? Riddle me that, you and your stupid logic! Why should I?  
  
_"Why?!" Samus cried, suddenly snapping from her state of stasis. She sat up, her face contorted into a savage grimace of frustration, as if trying to shake everything from her head. She stayed like that, frozen in place, for a second that seemed like an eternity, then gave a half-howl, half-sob and buried her head in her hands.  
  
Deep in the tunnels of Kelta-Z, the Huntress cried.  
  
{} {} {}  
  
(I know that was a reeeeeeeally short chapter, so I apologize. I'll get working on the next one right away...  
  
Somebody should sue me for cruelty to characters, shouldn't they?) 


	9. Be a Hero, Samus

(Well, I finally updated. Long absence did have a cause, though—I lost my rough draft [nervous laugh]...somewhere and just now found it again. Proceeding...after you finish the chapter, the A/N at the end should explain a minor detail if you haven't figured it out by then. Good luck...)  
  
X X X  
  
IX: Be a Hero, Samus  
  
Adam Malkovich sat in the control room of a small HQ satellite base, monitoring transmissions. Though he was isolated and had only a small force of lower rank federation workers under him, it was far from an insignificant position; overseeing the sorting and distribution of the trillions of megabytes of information picked up by HQ's satellites held enormous responsibility.  
  
A signal on one of the screens caught his attention, and he finished his conversation with one of his officers to open the new link. The face on the view screen began speaking immediately. "Sir, I've been having some problems with the search...the stupid thing won't work the way I need it to. I though of a few solutions but I'm not sure if they're..._permissible_."  
  
Adam bit back a laugh at the words. Samus Aran had been sorting through information at the base, searching for anything that could lead her to the Chozo. Knowing the bounty bunter, he could guess what kind of solutions she had in mind.  
  
"'Hacking' is not permissible, Samus. But I think a slight alteration of the program would probably do it no harm."  
  
"What I wanted to hear, sir." Samus terminated the link and started furiously tapping code into the computer at her station. Modifying the program would be tougher than simply cutting through it to what she wanted. But the thought of finding information about the Chozo spurred her on, and she concentrated and began to see an effect.  
  
Quite a few hours later, she tested the new component, tired but satisfied. The search loaded for a few seconds, then bleeped in completion. Samus stared. The screen was loaded with information. More than she had learned in a lifetime, a measly few megabytes. It might not all be about the Chozo directly, but every little clue, however faint, could help her in her search, which lately had been feeling like an obsession. Without hesitating, she began to copy all the data to her ship's computer.  
  
Samus was so focused on her work that when the alarm first went off, she almost didn't notice.  
  
A shrill siren irritated her ears, whining on and off, on and off. She only registered what it meant when the warning lights began to flash, bathing the computer room in a wash of bloody red light. People around her looked up, expressions of panic flitting across their faces; Samus, jerked from her concentration, leapt to her feet, instinct telling her finger to leap towards the trigger of her beam cannon, although the power suit was actually stored in her ship in the docking bays. It reminded her vaguely of her Zero mission, just a few months ago—defenseless, nowhere to run.  
  
The alarm drummed on for what seemed like ages, not stopping for the customary all-clear signal; the tension in the room was clearly evident, as tight-lipped, wide-eyed government workers stared at the main view screen for the forthcoming announcement. Finally, the lights shut off, and Adam's face crackled into view, pale but still looking stern.  
  
"Attention. Terminate all transmissions immediately and transfer to emergency backup. As soon as you are finished, board the evacuation ships in your designated group. Pilots are responsible for their groups—leave as soon as your group is assembled. This is not a drill...I repeat, this is not a drill." There was a pause, as he took a deep breath and continued: "A force of space pirate ships has been detected coming in our direction; with the current defenses, we can't fight them off. The ETA is fifteen minutes. Once the evacuation is complete, our system will be wiped. Once again, this is not a drill. Good luck."  
  
The screen shut off, leaving the occupants of the computer room to simmer in the shocked quiet that ensued. Then, as one by one the federation workers came to their senses, a flurry of last-minute activity swept across the room, depriving it of its silence. Samus's heart was pounding so fast it felt like a drum. Fifteen minutes...  
  
The information. How long would the transfer take? Adam had said...  
  
Samus gritted her teeth. She might never find this source again...it was almost half done already. She sat tensely at the unit Adam had let her use as the copying ticked slowly on, the only still figure in the mass of rapidly evacuating people. She found herself hunched over the screen, counting with the numbers, urging the computer faster. Five minutes passed, and only six others remained in the room...eighty-eight percent...seven minutes, two people, ninety-three percent...eight minutes, and no one was left in the room. Ninety-seven...ninety-eight...ninety-nine...download complete!  
  
Samus flipped the switch on her computer, not even bothering to shut the system down, and leapt out of her seat, well-trained legs propelling her down corridors and through hatches at breakneck speed. She vaulted up two flights of stairs to the docking bays, taking the steps four at a time, bursting through the blast doors and skidding toward the airlock her ship was held in. Then, just before she activated the control to the entrance hatch, a voice echoed from the right of the hollow white area of the docking bays: "Samus! Samus Aran!"  
  
Samus whirled around at the familiar voice, stopping in her tracks, just in time to see Adam Malkovich jogging around a corner, clutching a large square synthetic-leather box. His eyes, normally so carefully guarded, registered relief at her presence.  
  
He was breathing hard, especially compared to Samus, who had barely suffered from her sprint, but he still kept his commanding appearance. "Lady, I have a mission for you."  
  
"Now? With—the circumstances?" She gestured toward the airlock, knowing he understood. With Adam, she was never in doubt about that. He nodded slightly, face contorted into a slight frown, "Because of them. Basically, some of the information here is , to the point that it would be a major disaster for it to fall into space pirate hands. We thought our cloaking devices would be enough...it seems not, however. These disks," he indicated the box with a dip of his chin, "are the condensed hard drive. I need you to deliver them to HQ."  
  
Samus's breath caught in her chest with an unknown apprehension as she reached out to take the case from her former CO. "Why can't you do it?" she asked, the possible answers floating around in her mind like thunderclouds of ill omen.  
  
He didn't look her directly in the eye as he answered. "You're the better pilot." This wasn't the Adam she knew; he was hiding something. He'd never done anything like that before. Alarm coursed through her body, and Samus, words choked, said, "Adam. What is going on?!" "One ship," he said quietly, as though he could soften the truth by making it inaudible, "will never get by the space pirate fleet. They've surrounded the base. The only way for someone to escape with the disks will be for one of us to stay behind and distract the pirates. You—leave. I'll fly out before you and be the decoy."  
  
"But you'll be—"  
  
"I know the possibilities. But this is why I joined the federation in the first place—to...make a difference. To somehow affect our universe." He blinked once, grey eyes sorrowful, and yet terribly resolute.  
  
Trying hard to keep the panic from her voice, Samus cried, "But that's my job—my job to fight! Why do you think I'm called a bounty hunter? I have to stay here...you go." She stepped forward, offering the case back.  
  
He didn't take it. Just stood there, calm and collected, shoulders straight, head held high, grey eyes steely and serene at once. "That's why I have to stay, Samus. You WILL fight—perhaps more than you want to. But not now. There will be many other times with more at stake than a simple federation outpost. The galaxy—the universe—they need a hero. They don't know—that's not their fault, but you know it's true—and they'll try to put you down, but don't worry. One of them will understand. One of them must. Be a hero, Samus."  
  
He took a deep breath, then turned and walked calmly to the airlock where his ship had been docked. Samus, powerless, watched him go, then, unfeelingly, moved toward her own airlock once more. He had never looked back.  
  
A grey federation ship shot out of the satellite base straight into the head of a formation of space pirate battleships, bombarding them with laser fire. As the formation broke to ward off the pesky intruder, another ship slipped unnoticed through a gap, making its way on autopilot toward HQ as fast as it could.  
  
The human pilot of the ship stood at the window and watched the battleships converge on their target like flies. When the small grey craft was no longer visible, covered by the bulk of the space pirate ships, she blinked once and turned away.  
  
X X X  
  
(if that wasn't apparent, the X X X symbol means flashback. This is my version of Adam's 'death', although, as with all fanfiction, I still wonder how legitimate it seems...  
  
Ah well. Dang it, I forgot what else I was going to put here...[sigh]. Well, thanks for all the reviews, and I hope I can update sooner next time. Until next chapter...) 


	10. Resolutions

(A/N:

I wouldn't be surprised if all my reviewers had all died and gone to heaven, but I'll update anyway. Sorry for the wait! Dang, what have I been thinking?

Well, I've snapped out of it, so hopefully I'll start updating regularly again. I finished chapter twelve in the rough draft now, so all I have to do is type it up...

Well, no more blabbling. I'm sure if you haven't died yet you will reading this insanely long a/n...so I'll stop now. On with the fic!)

X: Resolutions

It was hard to tell whether she'd been dreaming or only remembering. Samus knew that at some point she had fallen asleep, at least for a little while; the last morning, when she'd woken up, still believing she was ordered not to move by HQ, seemed so long ago. Ages and ages ago. So much had happened—it was as if her whole world had been torn apart in an instant, to be replaced by this rectangular, mind-numbing cell.

She stared at the doorway, blocked by an invisible barrier. Like so many things in her life. So many things kept inside by manners, occupation, status. So many infernal little details that had shaped the way she thought. A line of plastic rimmed the entrance, probably what kept the electricity from sparking out of its generators in the wall frame. It was grey.

Grey, Samus thought. Grey federation ships. Grey corridors. Grey statues, the only remains she had left of the Chozo. Grey computers. Straight shoulders, head held high, strong grey eyes...

_Be a hero, Samus._

_Damn! _Samus thought suddenly, _it's impossible. Impossible not to care. I've been trying not to care since...since... but I've failed. It's impossible._

It was true.

She got up slowly, staring down at her hands as if by thinking about it she oculd make her cannon reappear. With it, it would probably take just a few shots to pulverize the circuits in the walls that presumably produced the electric current; without, there was little chance she could succeed at destroying them. Which meant there had to be another way to get out.

Samus paced the floor in a slow circle, trying to figure out a solution. There had to be one—the bounty hunter had never taken no for an answer. Her footsteps made a light, consistent tapping on the floor, and she could feel her suit building up the kinetic energy created by the motion, to store in the leg-armor for extra strength. That was the basic concept of the speed boost, to build up enough momentum to be used to propel the suit—and the wearer—forward, at a velocity high enough to burst through weaker walls.

...If she could blast through walls—the thought came naturally from the path her brain was taking—_why not electricity?_ Walking though it might kill her, but if she went through fast enough, it wouldn't have enough time to get through to her...but the speed boost worked only on straightaways and corridors long enough to build up enough power. She would never have enough space in this tiny cell.

Samus continued to pace, frustrated once more, feet beating a steady circuit on the floor...wait.

A circle had no turns.

Samus didn't hesitate any longer than was necessary. She launched herself into as wide a curve as the cell permitted, running as fast as she could. The hunter could feel the momentum building up in her suit, and it began to radiate energy, glowing weirdly like a strange neon light circling around and around in an insane whirlwind of color. There would be only one chance—she would have to get it right, or die.

Samus contained the energy and positioned herself, knowing it would de-charge in seconds if she hesitated. An instant longer, and she let go and felt the power shooting her through the air, into the barrier.

She hit and kept going, eyes squeezed shut against the seething, crackling electricity that pulsed and tore around her. It was too much...she wouldn't make it...trails of lighning scorched her body, going through the power suit like it was so much conductor metal...

Samue hit the wall on the other side of the outside room, heavily-armored shoulder first, making a dull, structure-shaking thud. Stray electricity arced over her body, fading slowly as her power suit absorbed it. She lay there, feeling the flesh on her body hot and burning, then sore, then, slowly, cooler and cooler until it felt normal once more. Then, taking a sharp breath, she hoisted herself up from the groud and began looking around.

She was in a large room, maybe a storage room, filled with 'open' compartments like the one she'd been held in. Some had equipment, and others tanks of specimens, experiments of all kinds. There was a computer terminal on an island in the center of the room, full of silent, blinking screens. And it was deserted.

Samus took a step forward, cautiously, hearing her steps echo in the suddenly oppressive silence. Where was everything? There should be space pirates here. Should be activity, guards, scientists, something. Not empty.

She took another step. All prior experience was screaming at her, to run, get out as soon as possible. _Trap!_ It shrieked, _It's all a trap, Samus!_ Still, she stepped on, every sense wired to her surroundings, expecting any moment for something to leap out, snarling a battle cry. _This shouldn't be like this,_ she thought, _but, if it really were true..._hope battled sense for dominance of her actions, and hope won. The computer sat docile, a sea of information at her fingertips.

Still, she had to be careful. Samus scanned the room nervously though her visor, checking for traps or ambushes lying in wait, watching for some letting-down of her guard; when none were apparent, she stepped closer to the computers and began to look for ways to access the system.

It wasn't that difficult. As she explored the network of the computer, noting the quirks and traits of the machine, Samus mused that she'd been hacking a lot lately, and nothing her 'research' had revealed had ever been good. She scrolled down lists of information, pictures, charts and graphs. Some tecnological designs caught her eye, but she resisted the urge to examine the odd forms closer; she had to stay focused on the goal. She was about to close the file and look elsewhere when she noticed a tiny link at the bottom, and, curious, clicked it.

An exclamation stopped short of whispering out of her lips. Laid out on the screen was a huge web of links and information, carefully hooked together and sewn into a master-plan for disaster. And her amazement never stopped growing, as she skimmed each of the central parts in turn, her brain fighting for comprehension of such a large-scale plan. It was all here. Floorplan of the ventilation shaft; information set onto a fake computer terminal; information fed to HQ; images from false transmition; record of emails and voice messages sent to/from arastrough's PC...it all fell into place as she looked over the information. It had all been a trap.

The pictures of Adam, used to lure her to Kelta-Z. A slip of 'Yeldir's' tongue, allowing the media to catch wind of the situation. The weak paneling in the ventilation shaft, assuming she would just barge straight through it and fall right into the computer room, where a terminal laced with incorrect facts would be waiting...

Samus felt her amazement slipping into anger. It had all been manuevered and mapped so far that she couldn't tell whether it had included her, right now, in this room, reading this. Maybe this, too, was all fake. But something told her that so much information could not be lying. There were other things in this computer, too much to have made up for a scene-setter. It had all been a trap, for HQ and most of their fighting force. And she, Samus Aran, was the bait.

"Dammit, Ridley, this is going too far," she croaked, anger blossoming in her chest. "I didn't come all this way to be manipulated!! I WON'T be part of your plan! I won't let you!"

She looked into the screen again, filled with a livid determination. ...documents sent to HQ through PC. Last transmission... her heart sank. The transmission summoning the officials to Kelta-Z had been sent nearly two hours ago. It took about an hour to get here from planet Aressus, which was several hours from HQ...and if they had started immediately after receiving the message, that gave her approximately an hour. Sixty galactic standard minutes. Thirty-six hundred rapidly ticking seconds.

Samus felt her pulse beginning to race as she automatically began reeling off a list of what she had to do. Find her cannon and helmet—try to disble the inhibitor if possible. If not, she could do it later.

There must be some type of destruction device Ridley could use to kill off all HQ's people once he'd gotten them inside the base. Samus knew what she had to do—find it, and activate it with Ridley still inside, before HQ arrived. Get out, if she could. If not...

Samus gritted her teeth, mentally cursing once again. There would be no time for error, no time for deviances from her path once she'd set it. She would never be able to defeat Ridley and leave in the time she'd allotted herself, not if she'd already set the device. Her only way would be to avoid him completely, or in the event that she encountered him, to detain him long enoughfor the station for the station to be cleared...with both of them inside.

_For the galaxy._ Samus swallowed every ounce of fear or apprehension, letting her face and mind clear of emotion. She'd already wasted precious minutes...

_And Adam?_ the thought crashed through her mind, heedless of her defenses. What if he wasn't really working for the space pirates? What if...she could rescue him? Samus felt her throat choking up as she imagined leaving him, once more, just as she'd come so close... but if not...

She took a deep breath, mentally preparing herself for what she was about to do. she had to destroy the base before HQ got here, and get out herself if she could. She would not waste hundreds of lives to attempt to save a man who might not even be worth it. It was what Adam would've wanted—the real Adam, the one she'd known so long ago.

_Be a hero, Samus._

(allright...again, I'm sorry for the long wait. Now, all I ask is your forgiveness...and a review to get me back into momentum. begs please?)


	11. No More Time

(See! I haven't forgotten! Thank you for all the reviews, (yay, you're not dead yet!!) and I'll try to update soon.

Hmmm, I was just reading the last chapter, and it almost seemed mary sue-ish. Can anybody tell me if that's the case? I absotively despise mary sues and all their sueishness! SAMUS IS NOT A MARY SUE!!...so I hope I'm not making her into one. Tell me, please.

Okay, now that that's over with. Thanks for listening to me rant...as if you had much of a choice... anyway, on with the story!)

XI : No More Time

Samus scrolled through information frantically, searching, searching. They would have a record to where they'd put her suit parts... now that she had the computer's files, it was relatively simple to locate the information she wanted. A map of station Kelta-Z, complete with recently updated information. She downloaded the data onto her suit with a connection in the left forefinger, then found the charts and located where her helmet an cannon were stored on the map.

A research lab, several floors down. Evidently the pirates were still trying to fathom the Chozo technology. Good luck, she thought grimly. The Chozo had been the most intelligent beings in the known universe. They were considered extinct now, but Samus was convinced the few remaining bird-people had gone on to seek a better place to set up their peaceful civilization—another part of the universe, somewhere nobody else had the presence of mind to imagine possible. All they'd left were ruins, statues, and a great mystery.

That and their hatchling, the warrior, a woman with a job to do. Samus typed quickly, knowing she should never trust her time on the computer—the longer she stayed in one spot, the more risk there was of someone finding her. Someone, or something. If she were captured now...

She preferred not to think of the alternative. An agonizing search, then Samus found the information she'd been looking for. The inhibitor on her suit could be changed and controlled by the computer; a simple code would disactivate it. A bit more hacking, and she activated the code, feeling the subtle rush of power through her sit as the functions smoothly restored working. Another code, and the device unbonded with the suitmetal, leaving the bounty hunter free.

She dashed out of the room the instant her work was complete, each footstep seeming to echo weirdly from the synthetic-plastered walls and ceiling. It was deserted—too empty and dead for comfort. She'd seen the map displayed on the computer, her mind already plotting a course of action; just check it on her helmet computer, and...

Oh, no. Samus stopped halfway through her plans and groaned inwardly. How could she had been so stupid? She may have downloaded the map, but without her helmet she had no way of viewing it. It would be guesswork all the way down to rescue her equipment—and would more than likely shave off valuable minutes from her already-tight boundary.

Racing down the corridor, the all-encroaching silence making her steps seem to ring in her ears, Samus could feel her heart thrumming alarmingly in her chest. Running so much was nothing new to her...it was the emptiness. No space pirates. No Ridley. The place was a disaster waiting to happen.

Hundreds of thousands of red eyes gleamed up at Ridley, standing like a stone dragon in the center of the top level—a single, gigantic holding bay. The man standing unmoving beside him was hardly visible to those who were far away, and insignificant to those who were close enough to notice. He was nothing, compared to the Lord of Kelta-Z in full power.

"This will be the biggest battle of your lives," Ridley said, sibilant voice magnified to fill the entire assembly. _And the last._ "Fight for all that they did, to us and to our ancestors, the first pirates. Fight for freedom from their cruel, oppressive laws and biased ways. Space pirates will rule!"

A hissing roar swelled from the crowd, rising and reverberating, through the walls, through the station. _And,_ the dragon thought, a smile creeping into place on his long snout, _and Ridley will rule the Space pirates._

He called forward a company of pirates about fifteen large, barely noticeable from the host. In a lower voice, he gathered them around the food of his pedestal and said, "Get some 'nice' bits from the video surveillance, then turn on the gas. Whatever you do, don't go near the cell itself. I don't want to take any chances."

"Yes, sir," the head of the company said.

Samus turned back from another dead end. She'd been searching for an elevator, no success. The time was ticking steadily on, she knew; it would all be useless unless she could find her suit parts. They were part of her.

She kept looking, frustration at her situation clouding her thoughts and building up in her chest like a growling, pressuring heat. She had narrowed it down to a specific area, but the exact location eluded her; Samus felt like she was going in circles, and would never stop but end up wasting all her time in this single loop...

It was a huge relief when she finally struck a corridor that she hadn't already traversed, the blinking iris hatch at the end sliding open to reveal an elevator shaft. The feeling was short-lived, however, as the slowly whirring platform transported its sole passenger down three floors and to another maze.

She vaguely remembered this section of the map, and cut through the other rooms as quickly as she dared. All empty. Wondering where all the space pirates were made Samus shiver, in spite of herself; she concentrated on finding her equipment.

It was agony, though. Just the..._implication _of so many pirates gathered together—as obviously none were down here—was too much too imagine. The only thing she could imagine them doing was planning an attack...one of epic proportions.

Then a hatch in front of her slid open, and there was the research lab—a multi-dimensional open place full of cabinets, bizarre instruments, and tables. Computers, too, to hold the data they acquired. It didn't take Samus long to find her cannon and helmet. An irrational, primitive anger surged through her body as she surveyed the analystic machines and wires connected to HER power suit parts. How dare they—how dare they violate the Chozo's creation. Space pirate scum!

She ran to the table at which they were set up, ripping wires and attachments off and quickly feeling up and around helmet and cannon in turn. Nothing seemed to be damaged; with an inward sigh of relief, Samus settled her suit parts onto her body, the suit automatically accepting them and sealing it together like they'd never been taken off. It was an odd sensation, like something healing that she hadn't been aware was broken.

There was no time for anything else, Samus reminded herself fiercely. Now that she had her helmet, she had to find any destruction device on her map and activate it... She brought up the map without delay, panning through the levels of the base. It was far larger than she'd explored, or expected—sixteen levels to her measly four or five. Most of them were below the ones she'd been in, but there was one above...odd, Samus thought. The whole floor was one huge room.

"What did you say?" Ridley's voice was cold as ice, and just as slippery. The head of the space pirate company he'd sent to give the clips to Arastrough stared up at him; stoically, considering it was Ridley he was facing.

"She's gone, sir."

The ruler of Kelta-Z was silent for a moment. Then—"Send old clips, then. Try to determine how she escaped." He was back in the command room, with his experiment; the rest of the space pirates still milled about the holding floor, waiting for the signal. The company leader saluted and took his company marching off down the corridor toward the security vaults; Ridley pondered him, turned back to the computer, then, in a sudden good mood, seriously considered promoting the creature. At least he would die happy.

The reason for his happiness was on the view screen. **Warning: Laboratory B4C: Testing Interrupted. Equipment Damage Detected. Source Unknown.** The dragon would bet his life that that was Aran, after her power suit.

A smile cracked his face as the system picked up the 'foreign entity' on her way up the elevator, then down the higher-security corridors leading to...weaponry control room. She was onto his plan...or, at least, one of them.

Samus felt like there were invisible eyes watching her as she pelted down the empty corridors toward the place her map had determined was the control room of the auto-destruct explosives. The way the time had passed was astonishing—according to her helmet computer, she had only twenty minutes before the feeds would get to Kelta-Z, and it was still too little. Samus ran faster, footsteps echoing out into the oppressive silence.

There it was, the door. She activated the iris hatch and it slid open, revealing a large room, basically empty, but with a large, boiler-like structure in the corner to the right of the entrance. She could imagine that normally the place would be riddled with guards, tapping back and forth or lurking in the shadows, making sure no strange rebels leapt into the room and set off the controls; the emptiness once again felt too hollow, too cover-up, to be true.

She checked her map again, noting that an entry passageway was very near the room—just up and around a few more corridors. It seemed odd that everything was going so well...but she had to move quickly. Samus dashed over to the huge pipemetal structure, searching for the controls in her scan visor. They were simple—a timer, up to forty standard minutes, a knob with marks around the edges, and a full keypad for the code.

She'd looked _that_ up through the computers in the research lab before checking the map and setting off, so it was no trouble. The instructions flipped up in her visor as she summoned them: turn knob right thirty degrees, push in, right another fifty degrees, pull out, left one hundred-eighty; adjust controls for desired area; punch in button code. She supposed that it was a precaution; by the time anyone put half of this in, the space pirate guards would be on top of them and they'd never have a chance to complete it...

_To Activate_, her visor told her in scrolling type, _Push Knob In_.

Samus hesitated just a moment before she completed the sequence, fingers just inches from her goal. She'd come here to find out about Adam, and would leave the same way she'd arrived—still unknowing, still with that terrible feeling that she'd left something behind. She hovered, almost feeling that HQ deserved what they got for trying to work with a traitor like Ridley...with a surge of anger, she remembered Arastrough and his petty lies, trying to keep her out of the way and harmless...

_They don't know._

She pushed the dial firmly in. A red light came on in a screen on the explosive device, blinking. Fifteen minutes until activation. Her heart pounding, Samus spun around and raced toward the door, already plotting the course on which she'd escape quickest. She drew her cannon to activate the iris hatch, several meters from it still...and stopped short.

The door had just been opened from the outside.

A hundred possibilities whirled through her mind in that single instant before the new being was revealed. Space Pirates, returning. A hungry, semi-sentient creature, somehow loose in the base. Ridley...not Ridley. It couldn't be.

It wasn't. It wasn't space pirates, wasn't Ridley. It was much, much worse.

It was Adam Malkovich.

(Don't we all just ADORE cliffies?)


	12. To the Death

(hehehe!! I Just LOVE Cliffhangers Don't You Agree?

bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla...

allright, I'll stop now. I expect some nice big reviews for this one; btw, and thanks Desert Lynx for being the only one to answer my question. Hopefully you all will get a better understanding of what's been going on from this one...--looks at chapter-- Okay, maybe that'll be chapter thirteen...

Just because, if you really wanna know (I didn't think so, but I'll tell you anyway) I got stuck on the third sentence of the fourth paragraph in this chapter, and didn't write any more for a few months. That's why I didn't update for so long...no, I don't expect you to care. Well, on with the story!

...finally...)

XII: To the Death

The iris hatch slid shut, leaving the tall figure silhouetted against an eerie blue glow. Samus had the fleeting impression that this was how she had appeared to thousands of space pirates throughout her career, but it was lost in the jumble of thoughts that flooded her brain. His footsteps were measured and precise, echoing slightly in the room, which suddenly seemed so large and empty; once he'd stepped from the light, Samus could see his face.

It was the same Adam she remembered so often, whether she tried to or not—but different. She squinted for a moment, her guard down just a fraction, trying to figure out... Same short greyish-brown hair, hard-set mouth, sharp and rather prominent nose. Same grey eyes...no. The eyes were Adam's eyes, but Adam wasn't in them. They were blank. Dull. Robotic.

And that's when Samus began to run.

She darted toward the door, but Adam was too quick. He stepped in her path, leaving the bounty hunter skidding to avoid hitting him. A laser shot rang through the air—he was carrying a sleek cannon with one arm, a fact Samus had barely noticed in her scrutiny of his face. She whirled around, searching for an enemy she knew didn't exist, and was rewarded for her doubt by narrowly avoiding another blast, so close it sent energy waves crawling up her skin.

He was going to kill her.

Whoever or whatever this was had been sent by Ridley to kill her. It couldn't be Adam. It couldn't. The thoughts churned through her head as Samus dodged another succession of rapid shots. The world was moving in fast-forward—or was it that her mind was thinking in slow motion?

Samus ducked and whirled, evasive, darting about the room in frantic motion, knowing all the while, in the back of her mind, that she couldn't go on like this forever. She had to do something. The time she'd set for her escape was trickling away with every shot he made, every time she barely escaped. But she could do nothing.

_That's not true._ A cold whisper in the very depth of her being, a realization like icy water trickling down the back of her neck. Like the blade of a knife, placed against her throat.

_You can kill him first._

_No,_ Samus said. _No. I can't._

_It would be simple. He's unguarded, untrained. Easy prey._

_I CAN'T!_

Her brain snapped back to reality a second too late. The beam hit her in the shoulder, with a blast of energy that made her reel to the side, the skin under her armor searing as she was jerked backwards, trying to regain control as a shriek threatened to tear from her throat. And it didn't stop.

The next shot DID knock her down, and before she could roll away another hit her chest. Pain was rolling across her body, tearing at the fibers of her consciousness with each measured, systematic blast—her body had lost control, convulsing as it sought blindly to curl into a fetal position, its last, pre-natal defense. And she was screaming, her helmet echoing as the tortured voice module gave up and her instinctive cry reverberated through the room, "Adam! Adam, STOP!"

He did.

A strained look came over his face, and he made a slight flick of his arm, as if to throw the gun away, that stopped before it could be called a motion. It was only for a second, but it was enough. In that time Samus's mind registered the break in the sequence, and, before she could stop to think, she wrenched her burning arm up and fired a single shot, straight at Adam's unprotected chest.

He staggered backwards, the impact lifting him off his feet momentarily and then dropping him down to crumple onto the floor. For a moment, Samus just lay where she was, numbness creeping up her limbs, breath sucking in and out of her chest—then the enormity of what she'd just done struck her, and she ripped her ravaged body up off the floor, savagely propelling her muscles to lift each leg in turn and stumble over towards the place Adam lay.

He wasn't dead. The coat and shirt he was wearing were scorched where her beam had hit him, but his chest was rising steadily if slightly, the muscles in his neck and arms working to push himself up and twitch toward the gun he'd dropped. Nothing had changed.

Samus dropped to her knees, the will drained from her body as suddenly and completely as if a metroid had just sucked her dry. Adam's eyes stared fixedly as he levered himself up on shaking arms, slowly, mechanically, inching toward his weapon. Samus knew she couldn't muster another shot. The voice of reason was silent. There was nothing left to do...

But then, as he turned his back to his quarry, propped up on his right elbow with the left groping for the cannon, his charred coat slid down off his shoulder, exposing the back of his neck to Samus's despairing gaze. Something snapped into place in the huntress's mind.

Facts and events all the way from that eternity ago, the news broadcast, to now. Incidences. Pictures she'd ignored as unimportant in the computer database. Glimpses of plans. It was all falling into place like puzzle pieces... There, mounted like a white-metal collar around the back of his neck, leaking battery fluid from a crack in the casing, was a small white rectangle with a panel of steady, glittering lights running around the top rim.

There was one last hope. Samus grabbed Adam's shoulder and pulled his back toward her, her cannon-arm hanging useless at her side, placed a knee on his chest as he tried to escape, transferred her left hand to the metal box and pulled it off.

There was a flash of electricity, one that traveled up her arm and knee to her spine, reawakening the tearing, seething pain of the beam cannon's shots. She could feel his body go rigid, and his eyes flew wide open, lips parted in a silent, ragged cry of pain. In the one part of her consciousness not being battered by crackling, electric energy, she knew it was the same force that consumed them both, trying to keep its hold as the machinery that contained it was torn from its place of power.

It stopped suddenly. Samus's head was bowed, ears ringing, as blotches of darkness chased one another across her vision. Her body was in shock, numb and listless, and as her eyes cleared she realized that Adam, still pinned to the ground by her knee, lay limp and deathly white on the floor, unmoving.

A cold rush similar to that in her body stole over her mind. Samus's fingers unfastened her helmet and dropped it to the ground, her cannon coming to join it a moment later, and then the glovelike hand extensions of her power suit. It was bare fingers that she ran desperately up his neck, searching, searching for any sign of life...

A faint movement of his lips. Samus bent her head down to the level of his face, turning her ear to catch what seemed, almost, just a tiny exhalation. "Samus," it whispered, "Samus Aran..."

And that was all. Samus stared down at the face of her friend and superior, no longer blank. She was beyond thought. Beyond movement.

Beyond tears.

(Nobody kill me! It's not over yet!)


	13. Lifeline

(A/N--Okay, so this is gonna take me a while to write because I think the ending of this chapter in the rough draft is pretty much un-salvageable, and I'll have to wing it. other than that, sry for the long time, I seem to have a LOT LOT LOT of homework these days. And no, how can you expect this to be the end??? There are too many loose ends (at least in my mind, and I'm the writer, so I should know) to just stop here. In any case...)

XIII: Lifeline

Ridley watched the tracking monitor as the ships from HQ grew steadily closer. A whole fleet of hard fighting federation police, officials, and elite corps. Many would die here today—and not all of them space pirates.

A light had been blinking in security for some time now; the dragon ignored it, eyes intent on the approaching enemy, mind intent on the perfect timing for the masterpiece of all his hard work to come to fruition. It was only when the shrill alarm whistle sounded that his head snapped around. That couldn't be right. Nothing was important enough to set off the alarm now except...

The lord of Kelta-Z stormed over to the panel, eyes widening. He'd assured that this wasn't going to happen until he activated his plan. But the message was clear: WARNING: STATION SELF-DESTRUCT IN 10:16:27.

Ridley's fist clenched automatically as he cursed aloud, rough words in the pirate language scalding the air around him. Aran. This was Aran's fault. All his elaborate work, after everything, had been undone by one pathetic homo sapien who could do nothing without a tin robot suit. His experiment's mission had failed.

There was only one thing to do.

Redness was swallowing Ridley's vision, and he roared, the sound shaking the computers and echoing back through his own skull. The dragon's huge wings stirred blasts of wind as he propelled himself wildly through the air and out of the command room, flapping like a whirlwind down the halls to the weaponry control room.

A heartbeat. A rhythmic ticking. Blue eyes stared down as unseeingly as now-closed grey ones had moments before. A different world before.

A heartbeat, but only her own.

And then, a roar.

A gust of air slapped into Samus's face, and the floor shook with the impact of all the force in the muscles of a gigantic creature. She could feel the power jolt up her knees, knocking chips of synthetic plaster off the walls around her; still, she turned her head slowly, knowing what she would see. A few minutes ago, she would've cared.

Ridley stopped just short of the entrance to the room, the situation changing in a glance. This wasn't right; it just wasn't right. Something was missing, something had changed. It was as if everything he'd known the world to be, unfalteringly, had just tilted sideways and now hung askew, dangling his mind off into a fathomless space. A frightening space.

Just before he'd entered, he'd been sure of what to do. Get in, fight the wretched bounty hunter for the millionth time, get out. Simple. But now...

He had no plan. The words sprung unbidden to his mouth as she took in the way she hunched over the man on the floor, almost protectively...

"I will never understand you, Aran."

Samus didn't answer. She only watched, impassive, as the dragon's fist darted out toward her bare skull, feeling the power building up behind it for the death blow...

Plaster splintered, raining down on her hair, and the wall shook just above her head, rending like dust with a dull thud. But she wasn't dead yet. Not yet. Ridley loomed above her, fanged snout just inches from her face. She could feel his breath scorching her face, sensitive from being protected by her helmet.

"I could kill you now. But I don't." It was almost as if he were talking to himself. "I should be tearing your head off your body. But instead I'm talking—wasting time—" His tail lashed out this time, making the wall shake. Rubble crumbled from the indentation. Samus didn't move, but her eyes were riveted to her foe's.

"They always said," Ridley hissed, his voice down to a venomous whisper, "that you had a heart of stone. Nothing could make the huntress yield. You could kill thousands and still show no mercy. Destroy planets and never look back. Turn a blank stare over every awed suitor. Yes, I've watched you, Samus, more than you think. But I never thought..."

He almost spat the words out, as if by saying them he defiled himself. "You love him."

Samus stared. A vague sense of something tickled the back of her mind, but she wouldn't listen to it, not now. The dragon's eyes bored into her own. "Well...well??! Is there nothing you can say?? It's not POSSIBLE!" He shrieked, filling her ears with the noise. "IT'S NOT POSSIBLE!! HOW COULD SOMEONE—SOMEONE SO—_heartless_—love anything?"

The words punctured her mind like a dart. A dim sense of logic raised its ugly head above the perfect stillness that had consumed her. "_Love_?" she whispered.

The silence stretched out behind the single word. Something so far back into her past that she couldn't remember when it had begun, a struggle centered on that thought, that humanity. There was nothing in her that even dared to mention it. A bounty hunter could not love, could not risk it. They had to keep away, keep cold, because there was an endless potential for hurt, betrayal, a life lived knowing it would never be fulfilled...but it was over now.

"You mean_ loved_?"

Ridley drew back suddenly, taking one gigantic step back, away from the huntress and her fallen comrade. And he laughed, even though the thoughts that raged through his mind were so intense that he couldn't fathom them. "You fool," he said. Were humans' senses so inadequate?...

Ridley's mind was racing. _He couldn't do it._ Couldn't kill her, not the way he could've minutes ago, when there were no doubts in his mind that she would've done the same to any living creature. At least, not directly...

Something was ticking. A red light blinked in the corner of his vision.

"This is not a favor, Aran."

He leapt into the air, feeling it cushioned beneath his wings, and propelled himself out of the room at top speed without a backward glance.

Samus stared. Something was missing here, something she hadn't gotten.

_tick, tick, tick._

It was impossible; Ridley couldn't have left her like this. Not without a reason. Why on earth had he called her a fool, and why would she think he was doing her a favor? Was there something she'd missed? Some clue, some thought?

She was being dragged forcefully from her state of numbness, the events driving her mind to think even when she wanted to just stay here, forever, suspended, and not think about what had happened. About Adam.

You love him... you LOVE him... 

Hope rose like a bubble in her chest, even as logic pushed it down. Ridley was a dragon; might not they have their own ways of determining...?

_tick, tick, tick._

Samus looked down at Adam, face pale and weathered; there was no apparent movement, or was that just a tiny flicker of her imagination? She couldn't tell. There was no way. No way it could work. And then, a slight memory surfaced in her brain: that of childhood stories read to her by a mother she couldn't remember, about ancient warriors with bright blades and armor.

Samus picked up her cannon, lying on the ground, and brought the shiny, unnamed metal up as close to his lips as possible.

_tick, tick, tick._

Her breath caught in her throat. The surface of the cannon misted just slightly.

And with that tiny breath, the rest of the world came crashing down.

Myriad emotions poured out of the recesses of her mind, fighting for uppermost in the inundation of thought. Samus stood still, torn between laughter and tears, energy surging through her veins but paralyzing her muscles. _Tick, tick, tick._ Only one thought blazed above the others with unwavering clarity.

_We have to get out of here._

HQ, Ridley's plan, the explosives...

Samus leapt up from her position, her legs protesting with the sudden motion after her stillness. They must've set into cramps—something she hadn't experienced in years—from the beating; but that didn't matter. She jammed her helmet onto her head, stuffing her fingers into her glove and cannon as she checked her computer. 2:23:08. Seconds were sliding away even as she focused on the sight in front of her once more, at each letter in every word of her thoughts.

Adam was unconscious. Alive, but unable to move. Alive, but not if he stayed where he was for much longer... Samus shook his shoulder, and received no response. Her brain seemed to be moving too fast, skipping all the logical solutions— There was no time for this.

She knelt, sliding her good hand under his shoulders, and hoisted her friend up in her arms without looking at him directly. No distractions. And, without a second thought, Samus ran.

The path came flying back into her memory as she left the room, feet slapping the ground with the added weight. Her power suit was completely drained. She was on her own, alone in the empty corridor—muscles straining to work themselves out, knowing there had been no power even to heal herself.

A few more corridors...1:56:37. The hall seemed forever. Samus's breath came out in ragged gasps, her lungs pumping furiously as she urged herself faster, and faster still. A turn. 1:07:12.

This escape route had been designed for someone with wings, not feet, her mind told her, the logic resounding in her head for no apparent reason. Her brain was working wildly, thoughts racing through the upmost surface, unable to control what was going on inside her mind. _She was going to die._ 0:24:37.

_They were going to die. _

NO!! 

Samus screamed out mentally, leaping forward on legs that felt like they were made of lead. _Fly me, Chozo ancestors_, she thought dumbly, _fly_... There was no way she was going to make it... 0:10:18.

The entrance was just ahead. And she was skimming the floor, her motion a blur even to herself, power she had never know she posessed making her legs race forward. Her mouth was open, gasping, sucking in too little air with each gigantic breath...

0:00:00.

The earth shook as tons of explosives detonated, the sound thundering through every bone in her body and every thought in her head. Samus put on a burst of speed, stumbled, and felt the ground that was suddenly against her stomach quake as a wave of intense heat surrounded her body.

(HAHAHA! Didn't I tell you I love cliffies?

On a different note, I'm sorry to all you dramatic people who think he should have died. I can put my chracters through a lot of cruelty, but in the end I'm really soft-hearted...I couldn't stand leaving poor Samus like that...besides, what's the point of bringing Adam back to life in a fanfic if he just dies anyway???

NeoAvatar—yeah, I meant yeldiR to be obvious (I mean, seriously. I spelled it out AND capitalized the last letter). Thanks for the thoughtful review, it seems there are very few people who are good at those.

Not that everyone who just says "it was good, update"doesn't rock, or anything... Thank you, all my reviewers!!

ï so please review again ï )

--AA-M


	14. Not a Good Day to Die

(OMG…this is taking a long time. Once again, I'm sorry about the wait, but I happen to be a very lazy, unmotivated author glares at self …who happens to write pointless a/n's that detract terribly from the reader's attention span...so saying…on with the fic!)

XIV: Not a Good Day to Die

Blobs of darkness swam drearily back and forth in a sea of undefined shapes and perspectives, their sole purpose seeming to be to drive a certain bounty hunter insane. Samus blinked, bringing the world into slightly better focus; several more times, and she was presented with a view that, if hazy, was bereft of the occupants of her previous conception. The ceiling sloped away from her left to her right, up to a height that seemed dizzying from this angle—what angle was it, anyway?—and there was an open hatchway in the wall furthest from whatever she seemed to be lying on.

She tried to move, but as soon as her muscles responded to her mind's summons, deep-set aches rippled up the bounty hunter's legs, back, shoulders, neck. Grimacing, Samus let herself flop back down again, trying to remember…

There had been a dream. Watching feet that stepped mechanically, dry earth and fires around them. A hand, gripping a ledge. An open hatch on the top of a smooth silver surface. Pieces of metal peeling off a pair of arms…and a man's haggard face…

Her eyes informed her that something in the room was moving, although a single image from the dream had detached itself from her thoughts to drift over, superimposed at the top of the strange apparition, and hover concernedly over her, brow furrowed over intelligent grey eyes.

"Lady? Are you awake?"

She didn't seem to be able to respond. Unsatisfied, the dream-face pulled back and began to walk away…

Wait a minute, Samus thought. Wait a minute…

Then she remembered—remembered in vivid, excruciating detail. Willing her voice to work, she croaked after the retreating figure, "…Adam?"

"Lady?"

"…You're not dead?"

"No more than you." Steps came tapping over, and in a slightly softer tone, "Probably less, actually. You should be resting, Lady, after…everything…why don't you just go back to sleep? Everything's under control—"

Ignoring the dry throbbing of her muscles, Samus levered herself upright, blinking out the fog that was creeping up her vision. She swallowed for a moment, then choked out, "I'm fine. Where are we?"

Someone was sitting on the foot of Samus's bunk, watching, as she looked around with an effort. "In your ship," he said. Brown-grey hair; back not quite so rigid as she remembered. Grey eyes.

"You don't say?"

He elaborated. "Orbiting somewhere in the area of the recently damaged planetoid… Kelta-Z." A frown crossed his features, and Samus's former CO looked at his hands. Those particular objects were reddened slightly, almost as if sunburned… The explosion. The heat wave. It gave her a mild shock to realize that her own skin had the same tinge—it wasn't just her muscles that had suffered.

Fragments of scenes flashed sharply in her mind's eye. Somehow, she'd made it to her ship, carrying Adam. Somehow. It was all like the bad dream that she had mistaken it for at first; hazy, as if her mind had somehow shut down while her body continued functioning. But there was something—something important. Something she couldn't remember…

"Lady…lady?" The voice interrupted her recollections, and Samus looked up, then jumped. Adam was standing in the doorway, grey eyes staring back at her; they slid away as she met his gaze, to land on the blank floor in front of him.

"What?"

"I thought you'd like to see where the ship's at from the computer. Coming?"

Nodding, Samus got up and walked after him, muscles protesting. The Chozo DNA infused into her as a child had given her the human equivalent of Chozo muscle and bone structure: the strongest muscle possible along with the least mass for their birdlike agility. Samus was neither as agile nor as strong as her mentors had been, but she was barely seventy pounds at almost six feet tall and could hold up her body's weight with one hand. On Kelta-Z, she had been, physically at the very least, taxed to the utmost—there was no other explanation for the muscle pain she felt at the moment.

She'd been a hair's breadth from dying.

Samus glanced at the back of the tall man who stepped briskly in front of her toward the control room. He must've regained consciousness before she did; what did he remember? Anything?

_Four years is a long time to be gone, Samus…_

Adam stopped in front of the computer terminal and gestured her over, face turned to the view screen. The bounty hunter stepped up by his side. It was almost like before, standing reviewing another mission to be completed…almost.

"Lady?"

"What?"

"I see you've gotten back safely—although your condition seems rather abnormal. Could this entity possibly be the friend of yours you've mentioned on previous occasions? Logical deductions lead me to the conclusion—" A few wild thoughts raced through her head in an instant—_what was he talking about?_—before she remembered the computer.

"Well…" Samus's throat momentarily stopped up as her mind searched for the right words. "Yes. ADAM…this is Adam."

Her former CO looked interested, a muddled expression between concern, sadness, and humility crossing his face. "They made a module of…me? I had no idea…how strange…"

Samus's mouth let loose the words before she thought about them. "Well, everybody thought you were dead. And after all…they do put the best…" The silence consumed her words as she realized, belatedly, the absurdity. Babbling.

The man's face, carefully guarded, changed. The quiet was uneasy, seeming to resonate with unspoken vibes of emotion. On both sides. Something Samus had never been exposed to before. He'd always known what to say—whether she was ranting about HQ, or space pirates, or just wanted to know whether she could do something…unorthodox…to help her find the Chozo. Stupid well-worded, confusing, fair person… She was the one who said nothing, usually. Unconfrontational, hiding everything away.

Adam looked away. "You can work out the location with your computer," he said, and exited the room. That wasn't like him… Samus waited until his steps receded, and then, with the emotion seeping up from its pulsing depths in her chest, she burst out in quiet frustration.

"It's not the same. How could I ever—ever imagine that I could bring him back? There's no purpose! I can't speak to him…if it's going to be like this, what have I done? Why couldn't he just _stay dead_? It might've been easier… maybe _I_ should've just died back there. Save the trouble." The words came out in a sharply exhaled string, and she slammed her palm down on the control panel, the slap stinging her chapped skin. It was all useless. Lifeless.

Then…

"Do you know how the computer determines an entity has entered the range of its sensors, Lady?" The voice cut through her ears and went straight to the brain, needling Samus's temper into another flare. "Yes, they teach everybody that at the federation. Must-know info." A muscle began to twitch in the huntress's forearm.

"Really?"

"No. Why do I care?"

The computerized voice continued as if it hadn't heard the question. "Every living creature's brain sends out tiny waves of energy, which can be detected by, among other things, the right equipment at a certain radius. This, along with movement, visual, and heat signals, shows what and/or who is entering the area the computer functions in.

"The signal is never the same for two different people—rather like a psychic fingerprint. Beings with higher thought process generally give off stronger waves than those that are more…animalistic. Take a human, for instance, versus a common pigeon."

At the moment, Samus felt she could care less whether she was more radioactive than one of those annoying birds that seemed to have mutant forms at any spaceport you went to. And yet, that one part of her that was always active, always conscious just below conscious, was soaking up the information and storing it in the back of her head, interested. The anger slipped away grudgingly, however she tried to hang onto it.

"If that's how it's going to be, you tell me: why should I care?"

"There are cases when the other three of the factors are detected without the brain waves—usually a machine or other nonthinking stimuli. However, except for the possible explanation that something has the ability, and the motive, to fool the physical sensors, there is no scientifically plausible explanation for the detection of brain waves in the absence of all three other factors."

Why would the computer tell her this? Samus stared hard at the screen, as if its bleeping statistics would reveal the answers to all her problems. Something she was wishing a lot lately. She managed to make her voice nonchalant, seeing as though, as she remembered, she _was_ angry.

"And what has that got to do with me?"

"The point is," ADAM pronounced, "when you entered the ship two hours ago, you were…accompanied…by an enormous amount of un-accounted-for brain energy. None of the ship's other sensors picked up anything; however, around you and your friend Adam, whom you were carrying at the time—without apparent effort or comprehension—this energy seemed to emanate, as far as the sensors indicate, from nowhere. "

Samus blinked. Something was rising in her chest, in her mind: a strange rush of disbelief, hope, a whisper of grey mist that swirled her thoughts into a jumble that she couldn't understand. It was like something she'd forgotten but just now remembered…or something she thought head forgotten her.

_Fly_, she thought, staring past the screen, back, to a silent, desperate prayer with confusion ahead and destruction behind. And then, later, a despair conquered by an irresistible urge to get up, to go on, not to give up just yet.

ADAM was still speaking, and Samus reverted to the present in time to hear "…Remarkable thing is that not only did this energy have no origin, it appeared not in simple waves but in contained patterns, similar to a digital outline, which, when drawn out on the sensors, resemble nothing so much as—"

"Chozo." Samus breathed. On the computer screen, the normal monitoring of the ship's functions sinking to accommodate the picture, was an image: an outline in shivering white lines. A bipedal, birdlike creature, deprived of wings when evolution decided that flexible arms and fingers were more necessary for their survival than their ability to fly. Their minds more necessary than their nevertheless strong bodies.

It came back to her then, in dreamlike quality. Whispers, words inside her mind. She'd thought she was hallucinating—that she was making things up.

_Daughter, be strong—it's not over yet. Hope, Warrior. Love. Let these last when all else is gone, and find more than you ever lost. There is another side to everything…we didn't raise you to die cold. Just look—there will be a way. Live, and fight your life another day._

Just a few words—words that said an eternity. The Huntress, the Chozo Hatchling, just stood there, eyes fixed on the image of something she thought she'd lost forever.

One of them, anyway.

(Allright, I know I'm drawing this out. Unfortunately, I have this strange attraction to over-dramatize these sad little pathetic scenes that the characters and readers have to enure.

Oy.

Until next chapter, then…in the hope that it isn't as long a wait as this!)


	15. Destiny, Or Not

(Weeeell, guess what? Another chapter? Yaaay! But be warned: If you don't like emotional, romancey scenes, go ahead. Skip the whole dang thing.)

XV: Destiny, Or Not

Footsteps. "Lady?" A man's face peered through the door connecting the command room with the rest of the ship; when she didn't respond, he walked, akwardly, over and tapped her on the shoulder—suddenly apprehensive.

Samus didn't turn.

"Am I interrupting something important?" Adam's gaze slid over the quietly revolving figure on the monitor screen …Chozo? How had she found this image? As far as he knew, the Chozo stored their information and research on their own supercomputers, and those had never been accessed—or even proved to exist—since the extinction of the species. One of the reasons that the bounty hunter's obsessive search had never pulled up more than fragments of anything.

But then, it had been four years since he'd had contact with the outside world. Two since he'd even woken up.

The awful thing was that he remembered it all: remembered supervising space pirates, taking orders from a dragon he called Master. He remembered, now, the dreams that had plagued his sleep—the only time the device was really turned off—the frustration of waking and knowing that he was missing something. He remembered thinking of the plan, making up information about a man called Adam Malkovich to put into a fake computer, all utilizing wisdom he'd had without remembering the experiences that he'd learned it from. It was all like a dream. Like a nightmare.

And then there was Samus.

That little figure on the viewscreen that he'd known—that something other than his brain had known. That didn't stop him trying to kill her when the Master told him to, though, did it? He'd tried so hard to remember—couldn't, until she'd figured it out—and by then he thought, for the second time, that it was too late.

A hair's breadth, he thought. A hair's breadth from dying, for the second time. It was like there was something that _wanted_ him alive—some purpose that kept him here. Perhaps it was fate. Although, the second time at least, Samus had saved him. Why? Why would Ridley use _him_, Adam Malkovich, as bait—for _her_?

It worked, Adam thought. Whatever Ridley's reasoning, it worked.

It was a while before she answered, without turning. "What?" There was something in her voice that turned his stomach, not because it was her voice, but because it…wasn't. Not in his experience, anyway. Samus had been furiously loud before; he'd seen her wickedly ironic, and even icy blank. But not—not this. Whatever it was.

"Lady, I…" he trailed off, almost forgetting what he'd come out to tell her; strange, because he'd never talked to her—really—about anything other than The Next Mission. Adam swallowed, pusing all his anxiety down into a place he couldn't feel it, couldn't let it bother him. He was, once again, the businesslike, confident CO, the one in control.

He could pretend well enough, anyway.

"Thank you. For saving me. And…I'm just sorry…for everything."

Samus took a slow breath, staring at the viewscreen. If he hadn't known better, Adam would've sworn she was hynotized by the image. "It's not your fault," she said. "Ridley made the plan. Stupid federation…stupid Arastrough.."

"It's not the federation's fault either," Adam said immediately; then, as what she'd just said penetrated his brain, "What did you say? Arastrough?"

"Uh-huh…" She seemed preoccupied, her voice…wavery. Something different.

"I knew him. We were in the federation police together," Adam told her, as if it mattered. "He was always greedy…acted nice to your face, but behind your back…they changed him to space pirate research later. He didn't have enough imagination for much more than gathering information."

Samus sniffed. "Sounds exactly like him," she said, in that strange voice again. Adam walked forward, concern overcoming his nerves for the moment. Samus Aran, the bounty hunter…

She turned away, but not quick enough for him to miss the tears rolling silently down her cheeks.

"Lady…"

"I know, I know," Samus said miserably. Why did he have to come back now—now, of all times? "I'm ok…just too…really, I'm fine…"

"It doesn't look like it." Adam stepped around her, trying to see her face, Samus guessed. He was probably laughing at her. What she'd always been afraid of.

Bounty hunters aren't afraid…

Samus whirled to face him, sucking in an anguished breath. "I know what you're thinking," she cried. "I know! Bounty hunters aren't supposed to cry, are they? They're supposed to be tough, supposed to be cool, disconnected…fake." She spat the word out with venom, not knowing how else to feel. Anger—it had always been her refuge. "Well guess what? We're humans, too, you know! We have feelings, we have lives…try to, anyway…"

It was just too much. Everything at once, this crazy rollercoaster of emotion. All she wanted to do was somehow be transported to somewhere else, somewhere she could be alone; other people made everything so…complicated. If this was what if felt like to be normal—to have normal relationships—it was no wonder so many of the populace went insane.

And what was to say, Samus reasoned, burying her head in her hands, the sobs now coming uncontrollably, that this wasn't insane? She was dimly aware of the fact that Adam was staring at her. _Let him stare_, she thought. _See who I am—a crazy woman who just doesn't know what she wants._

"Samus…" he said, very softly. She looked up, and his eyes caught hers, just as inescapably as if he'd pinned her down with two tons of grey steel. "It's ok. You don't have to be…anyone, or anything, but yourself…if you don't want to. I…I don't mind." Stepping forward, he brushed the tears from her cheek with one gentle hand, hesitated for a moment, leaned in and kissed her.

It seemed like a long time before anyone said anything. His hand was still resting on her jawbone when she pulled back, different emotions warring for control of her face.

Adam was petrified. What…what if…

_He'd just kissed possibly the most feared bounty hunter in the universe._

Drawing back, as if she'd try to kill him at any moment—he knew she was capable of it—he sputtered, "…Lady, I…sorry…"

"Me, too," Samus said, once more looking at the ground. "I suppose you weren't laughing at me then…"

"Never, Lady. Samus."

She was starting to cry again. It made him wonder—just how much did this bounty hunter hide from the rest of the world? Did she think she didn't need anyone but herself, then?

"L—Samus," he offered, tentatively, and she sniffed and looked up. "Isn't it hard…sometimes…to, if I may use the expression, cry on your own shoulder?"

A shrug. Well, at least she hadn't exploded again, yet. _Yet_ being the key word.

"Look," he said, trying to form the idea that had been growing in his mind into words, "I know you have a job. So do I, for that matter…or rather did…but does that have to be your life? We have duties to others, yes. One reason we—especially you—have so little time of our own. I know you can't give up on something like that, because, ultimately, if you don't do it, who will? Possibly nobody. But at the same time, you can't live for killing, or for computing, or for doing the government's bidding. At least not all the time. I think…you've got to have yourself, too."

Samus breathed in deeply a few times, raised her head, and looked at him straight, without faltering. This was the Samus he knew—strong. Resolute. Brave. "The Chozo ghosts," she said, wonder in her voice, "maybe that was what they meant…" She blinked, then, smiling in a watery way, the Huntress walked over to Adam Malkovich and buried her face in his shoulder, trying not to laugh through her tears. They just stood there, holding each other, ingnoring everything. The world. The catastrophe that had just been averted. The fact that the federation would be demanding an explanation for why its friend Yeldir was gone. That the'enemy' CO was still alive. And, of course, Samus Aran had NOT been captured, contrary to populary belief.

It didn't matter.

In a quiet reality further away than any ship could fly, a group of birdlike creatures clustered around a single, glowing sphere of light that one of them, apparently in a trance, held in its outstretched clawed hands. They were watching a strange almost-human drama that playing itself out, billions of thoughts away.

The one holding the sphere stirred; the shimmering globe dissolved as it shook itself, large avian eyes blinking open. It looked around at its fellows, gathered about it, and smiled, satisfied.

_Hatchling_, the Chozo voices whispered.

(WOOHOO! I cannot believe I just wrote that…

this is sort of my pet chapter, because actually, I haven't ever tried a romantic scene of this caliber before. so speaking big puppy eyes if it sucked, please inform the author, aka ME, through a review.

And for those of the above opinion, you have my promise that this is the last of these stupid romancey chapters. The next chapter will probably be the last, so… NO MORE ICKY! Hehehe…

…oooooooook, that was random. Until next chapter, then…buh-bye:D ¡AA-M! )


	16. Not the End

(Whoa…I just thought about it. this is the LAST chapter of So I Thought…the end you've all been waiting for.

Hmm.

Well, I completely butchered my writing style last time, due to an overdose of romance and Friday-night-insanity, so I'm trying to get back on track. For the final stretch.

Well, here goes nothing.)

XVI: Not the End

X X X

Matthew Arastrough stared at the viewscreen in front of him.

This could not be possible. There must be something wrong with the location, with the computers, with his mind…

It could not be.

The copilot of federation unit 31A, the head of Arastrough's fleet, walked over, the boots of his combat suit attempting with little success to muffle his steps. "Something wrong, Sir?"

Arastrough swiveled from his seat at the control panel and gestured out the expansive cockpit window. "Something wrong? Look out there. Look at that, and _tell me there's nothing wrong_." His eyebrows creased together at an alarming angle; cautiously, his copilot stepped to the window and peered out.

Kelta-Z was gone.

In its place there was a swirling cloud of rubble, orbiting listlessly around a chunk of ash-blackened, misshapen rock probably a few miles square, at the least. "Check the coordinates, Dustin," Arastrough barked. "There must be some mistake." A few moments, a frantic tapping of keys, and the navigator turned back to his commander, a doomed expression fixed in the set of his lips and brow. "Correct, Sir. If I've checked once, I've checked a hundred times." He paled at the piercing glare of his superior, who leapt from his chair to pace the synth floor, lab coat rustling conspicuously in the silence.

It could not be.

He'd checked the last email from Yeldir as soon as it came in; the files had said that all was well—the pirates were unsuspecting, and Aran safely behind bars, or electric charge, as it were. Aran. Just her name made him shudder in revulsion. The treacherous little bounty hunter had made a fool out of him, ruined his best project yet...

That was it. Somehow, she'd escaped—somehow, in all Yeldir's deviousness, he'd failed to successfully contain Samus Aran. Arastrough's train of thought progressed rapidly, rationalizing, pumping out ideas at breakneck speed. If Yeldir hadn't contacted him by now, what with the 'change' in Kelta-Z…it COULD mean…

Murdered. Murdered by that woman again, Samus Aran.

A manic gleam crept into Arastrough's eyes, and he stopped pacing, sat down in front of the control panel once more.

"Change of plans. Back to HQ," he told Dustin. The navigator blinked, but didn't question. It was never a good idea, no matter how ludicrous the order.

One tense minute, as the command was relayed back throughout the rest of fleet; then the federation-grey, enormous craft turned in space and shot back to where it had come from. Arastrough wasn't smiling. He could afford to wait…Aran would come back. She was bound to.

There would be hell to pay for this.

X X X

The woman in question was lying on her back on another synth floor, this one that of a silver, hunter-class gunship on the other side of Sephaniza Matrim. Arms crossed behind her head, Samus stared up at the stars beyond the view portal that extended in an oval above her, silent.

Adam Malkovich was sitting in the pilot's seat. He was quiet at the moment; Samus had just finished telling what had happened, from planet Aressus to now.

"Now," he said finally, turning to look at the bounty hunter, "Where do you want to go?"

"Huh?"

"You must have had some destination in mind, when you set off to rescue me." There was a hint of amusement in Adam's voice; Samus switched her eyes from the heavens to his face for a moment to answer, since it was impossible to shrug in that position. "I don't know," she said, trailing off in the realization of the correct answer to that particular question.

It would have to be done sometime.

"HQ will be looking for me, I suppose…"

"Yes."

Samus levered herself upright, knowing her chapped skin would miss the cool of the floor, seeping up through her bodysuit, in a moment. She made a mental note to add some sort of burn cream to her first aid kit. If she got around to it.

The idea that had been growing in her mind for the last half hour or so, as the silver ship made its way away from the remains of Kelta-Z to an unknown destination, pressed at the back of her head—hopeless in its hope. It felt like treason, mentioning it, even now. Now, when she had every reason in the world to back her up.

Adam's eyes were intelligent. Sometimes too much so.

"Something wrong, Lady…Samus?"

There was one, intense, fractional second of silence. The air seemed to quiver. No, Samus's thoughts were shrieking. No. No. Say No.

She shook her head. "It was just…well, I was thinking. Right now, hypothetically, neither of us have ties to…anyone, unless you have family you miss, or something…"

"I don't know, Samus. It's been four years. I sort of wonder what my friends are up to, but now, as I look back, there really wasn't much more to my life than work. It makes me think…" he looked at his hands, then back at Samus. "I doubt Ridley told you," he said, "but in the first two years I was at the base, I was in a coma. I was told later, by him, that I was found in crushed ship, pulled in as scrap metal by the space pirates. It seemed the cockpit had been smashed somehow, but the way it fell in left an air pocket. He never told me what I was doing in the ship. Now I know…I guess I always knew, just couldn't remember."

Samus's temper fizzled up at Ridley once again, dampened, in a strange way, by what the incomprehensible dragon had done—let her go.

_This is not a favor, Aran._

She controlled her thoughts to hear Adam say, "Basically, I could disappear right now and nothing would really change. I don't know about what's happening in the world. About anything."

He paused for a moment.

"Why do you ask?"

Samus stared up at the dark open space above her head, stretching infinitely out into the freedoms that danced like stardust in the trails of her own hastily-shaken-off dreams; freedoms imagined, but never realized, in a mind that was in itself a cage. She thought she saw now, in a warped and twisted way, what Ridley had meant by his comment.

Oh, Hatchling, but such a cage.

"It would be so easy," she said, slowly, as if the words would fizzle out on their burning path from her mind to hang, forbidden, in the air, "just to…leave. After all, everything that waits for us back there…" there was no need to explain where _there_ was; she knew he knew. "all there is is destruction. Not like I did at Kelta-Z, I mean. Legal issues, rumors, those damn little reporters…" Samus looped her arms around her knees and continued her scrutiny of the sky encircling the silver craft. "Right now…while there's still time…there's got to be a place, somewhere, that we could go. Just to get away. Leave the federation and all its problems, try to have…a life. A _normal_ life, I mean."

Living, not just existing.

Adam said nothing for a long time. The stars, light years away, shed a pearly luminescence through the five-inch-thick reinforced plastiglass. If she tried, Samus could see the outlines of a few ancient Chozo constellations, warped and misshapen because of her own position, far from any Chozo homeworld. The mother and nestling; KFara the Elder…and the Hunter. The hero of legend, the protector of the universe.

Samus Aran?

Adam was speaking.

"It's tempting. But we both know the answer, I think."

She nodded and looked at his face. "I thought,' she said, "…I think…my mind is like a cage, Adam. There's what I _can_ do, what I want to do, and there's what I _will_ do, because of these…I guess you'd call them values, that have been pounded into my head since before I can remember. Like…"

"You can't hide from the world…so why try? You just can't give up and let despair take you. I mean, you CAN—it is mentally possible—but the way you, and I, were raised, it just isn't possible to give up and still do the right thing. Even though sometimes the right thing isn't what the law defines it as. We have a duty, Samus…to do the right thing. To care. Sometimes you just can't take the easy way out."

That was it, Samus thought. That was it, there—what her life was, in a nutshell. Everything the Chozo had taught her. Except… Ignoring her skin's perpetual burning, she stood, lifting her body easily off the ground with the help of one hand, and walked over beside her friend at the viewscreen. "But duty can't become your life," she said. "There's got to be…something to come back to. I just don't know what that is."

"You don't?"

Samus caught Adam's eye and smiled, for the first time in what felt like years. Reaching out, he caught her hand and set it gently underneath his on the control panel.

"Back to HQ, then," he said.

The silver ship made an abrupt turn, fired its engines, and blasted off to face the future.

Epilogue-

Across the long emptiness of space, light years away, a small escape ship floated in the middle of a separate galaxy, stationary for the moment. Its occupant was staring out the cockpit window, much as his enemy was at about this time; much as, but without the peace that had found the Huntress for the time being. The world was changing subtly, and he didn't like it.

Ruined.

Again.

He'd _had_ her! What had he been thinking?

Ridley glared at the pale, distant, uncaring stars. Opportunity—too good a thing to waste on such hazy and unreliable concepts as _emotion_.

What had he been _thinking_?

The End…but not really.-

(Wow. It's over.

Wow.

Well, I'd like to thank all my reviewers— -grins- for all the great input and support for my story. I'm gonna miss your comments! My dad says I have to finish my other stories before starting new ones -pouts- (so unreasonable, isn't it?) but there ARE some ideas in the works. Soooo, with that in mind…

Until Next Mission! (Really this time.)

—Aran'sApprentice-Meahow )


End file.
